Why Is Informed Consent Important

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Informed Consent is necessary for medical practices and for the protection of medical patients, although it isn’t perfect, it has improved greatly over time. Informed consent is needed for patients involved with any biomedical experiment. By signing a waiver of consent, a patient is allowing their doctor to perform any procedure they feel is required to keep the patient safe and healthy. Before medical professionals give consent, the patient must know all of the possible outcomes the procedure could have. “It is the duty of the doctor to make a reasonable disclosure to his patient of the nature and probable consequences”(Kirby 69). By not telling the patient, the doctor is denying the patient of their human rights of their own bodies. Before …show more content…
Full informed consent means that patients know every possible outcome that might happen in the process of the procedure or in other words, the patient must be an expert in the procedure or field doctors cannot possibly tell the patients all the outcomes, doctors are there to help people become healthy again and by telling patients the worst possibilities it will scare them away and the doctors will be unsuccessful at their profession. "Even the writings of medical spokesmen...emphasize the difficulty of obtaining informed consent or the impossibility of obtaining 'truly ' or 'fully ' informed consent"(Gray 41). This further explains the need for a more defined informed consent so there is not any confusion as to how a patient should be educated on their procedure. The question is, how much information is considered adequate to tell the patient? In the article by Jessica De Bord, it shows that there are three types of standards physicians should tell their patients. One standard is the reasonable physician standard where doctors determine what information is appropriate to tell the patient. This standard seems to be inadequate because the doctor could tell the patient hardly anything. Another way is called the reasonable patient standard where the doctor tells the patient typically what most people should know about the procedure which seems fair but not …show more content…
to be able to be informed of testing and sign informed consent waivers. " Much of the literature on informed consent deals with the special problems of particularly vulnerable groups from whom it is difficult to secure a full, free, informed and knowing consent"(Kirby 72). This means that for these groups of people, it is an issue to get their informed consent. As the quote said that it is hard to get a knowing consent, that means for people such as terminally ill some doctors don 't want to tell their patients the worst that could happen or that they are being tested for research because they are already dying. An example of this is stated saying," Southam loaded a syringe with saline solutions mixed with HeLa. He slid the needle into the forearm of a women who 'd recently been hospitalized for leukemia...He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with malignant cells"(Skloot 128). This is a true story and can be very frightening for some patients it shows that just because a women was terminally ill she was unable to give consent and is against her human rights. This often reminds people of the dreadful Nazi experiment, "nothing more profoundly affects modern thinking about the importance of informed consent in research than the Nazi medical experiments"(Gray 38). During these experiments,

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