Informed Consent: A Short Summary

Medical research has come a long way since an ethical approach to medicine was first outlined in the Hippocratic Oath. It is generally accepted that the principles of beneficence and of doing no harm arose in medical contexts. Respect for people’s autonomy is, however, a relatively new principle—one we can trace to the Enlightenment era. This principle is now a crucial one in the routine practice of medicine and in research. Informed consent is accepted as one way to put the principle into practice. If there were no such thing as informed consent, patients’ autonomy would not be possible. Recent history has many examples—the Nazis’ experiments or the Japanese tests of organisms on prisoners in Manchuria in the 1930s— where ignorance of or blindness to the principle of …show more content…
The main function of ethics committees is to ensure the rights and welfare of participants, minimising the likelihood of harm or injury to them during research. However, no standards exist concerning job descriptions for these committees, who the members should be, their methods of working, and so forth. Plomer suggests in more detail the function of ethics committees and gives an idea of how they might evolve in a more democratic way. She also introduces the idea of “ethical imperialism”—an idea that needs debate, especially in the context of research in developing countries. The reality of research today is the “globalization of medical research” and “export of clinical trials to underdeveloped countries.” Readers can easily see the traces of this development in the data the book gives on changing numbers of research studies being undertaken in various countries, especially in Latin America and Eastern Europe. These trends mean that we must turn again to thinking about the content, boundaries, and direction of medical research in the