When N.I.C.E. Became Hideous

Nice is synonymous with pleasant, good, kind and enjoyable. The British Health control system for which that acronym stands cannot be defined by any of those words; in fact just the opposite could be said. Hideous, on the other hand means repugnant, repugnant or dreadful.

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (N.I.C.E) which is part of the UK's National Health Service (NHS), is merely one layer of a bureaucratic, government run collection of organizations that tells Great Briton’s doctors how to practice medicine and it is the kind of system which the Obama administration wants to use to tell you and your physician when, where and how your health issues are to be handled.

Not too long ago the N.I.C.E. released a consultation document regarding the treatment of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Although the document reverses some of its earlier negative recommendations to completely withdraw anti-dementia drugs from the National Health Service, it now proposes to limit treatment to the moderate stages of the disease and to exclude people with Alzheimer's disease in the mild and severe stages. If that dreaded disease is not “nipped in the bud” it will not be nipped at all.These proposals are based on cost-benefit reasons, not the acrimonious misnomer “Clinical Excellence.” True excellence in the practice of medicine is based upon the axiom, PRIMUM NON NOCERE, first do no harm, not “What is this going to cost.”

It was that same political organization, originally established in 1999, which recently decided to withhold a cancer chemotherapeutic agent from a relatively young man who had a malignancy of the kidney that had metastasized to his lungs. The patient/doctor unfriendly decisions made by N.I.C.E. The unfriendly decisions made by that government agency over the past ten years would fill a tome too voluminous to read were I to list them, but I do believe that the reader gets the point; we don’t want that type of system installed in the US.

Whether C.S Lewis was highly prescient, or it was by mere chance that he used the same acrostic in his 1945, science fiction novel entitled That Hideous Strength, the devastating effects of England’s N.I.C.E over the past decade and the tremendous power and gruesome effects of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments in the Lewis work of fiction are too closely aligned to be comfortable. Some two years before writing his own Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell reviewed That Hideous Strength for the Manchester Evening News, commenting: "Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters [the N.I.C.E. scientists], and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realizable"