Nice as Oxymoron

[摘要] NICE is, at last, coming of age. At the time of its inception, I was critical. My main argument was that we already had lots of bodies telling us best treatments. Specialist societies issued guidelines, and amendments to guidelines; Royal Colleges did the same; while the Cochrane Collaboration trumped them all. I thought that NICE as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence was not needed, but NICE as the National Institute for Clinical Expedience was sorely needed. In the last year NICE has started to do what it should explicitly have been set up to do: not to decide whether this β-blocker or that ACE inhibitor is the best treatment for hypertension, but whether new expensive drugs that don't seem to do very much good at all should be prescribed on the NHS. Even if they are the only drugs available.

[学科分类] 卫生学