Comments on: Medicine and the Law - Part 4: Informed Consent

By: Medicine and the Law - Part 5: Abandonment | Brain Blogger

Medicine and the Law - Part 5: Abandonment | Brain Blogger — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:57:24 +0000

[...] contract and consent. Then we moved on to medical malpractice and causation. Finally we discussed informed consent. Now we move on to [...]

By: Going Beyond Informed Consent | Brain Blogger

Going Beyond Informed Consent | Brain Blogger — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:16:39 +0000

[...] response to my last post about informed consent in my Medicine and Law series, several commenters made the point that informed consent is more than [...]

By: Bob

Bob — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:29:59 +0000

I completely agree with Catherine.

There’s a tendency to reduce informed consent to a set of forms with boxes to tick and dotted lines to sign along. But that’s not informed consent. I’m sure it’s necessary for medicolegal purposes to complete a relevant set of documents and forms, but, really, what’s much more important is that the patient and the practitioner have formed a trusting relationship.

If the doctor really cares about the patient, he, or she, will do their best to help the patient to make a choice. Not just any choice, and not necessarily the choice the doctors would make for themselves, but the choice only the patient can make in the full knowledge of the contexts and values of their life.
The doctor’s job involves being well informed about diseases and treatments and making that knowledge available to the patient.

Informed consent is not persuading a patient to do what the doctor thinks is best. It’s empowering and enabling a patient to make their choice.

By: Catherine

Catherine — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 23:34:05 +0000

What is important for informed consent is a dialogue that is built up between patient (and/or guardian) and doctor. Simply presenting the information about the risks and benefits is not enough, the doctor must ensure that the patient actualy understands what it means and isn’t entering into the agreement under coercive or manipulative pressure. This puts a burden of trust onto the doctor, because the doctor obviously will know more about the procedure than the patient (most of the time), to tailor his or her description and discussion of the procedure for the understanding level of the patient, to discuss and explain the risks and benefits to the best of his or her ability, and to answer questions without bias or coercive pressure (one of the problems with pharmaceutical companies buttering up doctors can manifest here).

Informed consent isn’t just about getting the form signed. It’s about a transaction of information between a doctor and a patient in order to establish the understanding of the process of a procedure or medical treatment, whether it is the appropriate procedure or treatment, and then to allow the patient to waive their expectations of normal behaviour in order for a doctor to provide a procedure or treatment (such as invasive or painful treatments).

The part that “gets doctors into trouble” is not establishing a good communicative dialogue with the patient. Communication is *essential* to informed consent.

By: medicine

medicine — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 17:31:32 +0000

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