Bioethics: Informed Consent

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Philosophy | Teaching | Seminars | Honors

Informed consent refers to the action of an autonomous, informed person agreeing to submit to medical treatment or experimentation. The idea arises from the duty to respect an individual's autonomy because persons should have the ultimate say in what is done to their bodies, and that they ought not to be treated without their voluntary, informed agreement. The ethical ideal has also been adopted into professional and legal codes.

Vaughan examines five conditions necessary for informed consent to exist:
(1) the patient is competent to decide
(2) the patient gets an adequate disclosure of information (Canterbury v. Spence ruled on what constitutes *adequate* disclosure)
(3) the patient understands the information
(4) the patient decides about the treatment voluntarily
(5) the patient consents to the treatment.
In the video I discuss each of these conditions in more detail.

There are important exceptions to the obligation to obtain informed consent. In the case of waiver, a patient voluntarily and deliberately chooses to give up the right to informed consent - this authority is turned over to the physician or surrogates. A controversial exception is the invocation of therapeutic privilege. This is the deliberate withholding of information from a patient when the physician deems disclosure would likely do harm. Laws vary on permissibility and limits of therapeutic privilege, as do different normative theories.