Informed consent: Can patients ever truly be informed?

This post by Paul Levy got me thinking about informed consent, and a case I saw recently got me to take a little time and write about an issue frequently ignored in medical school. A bit of background for non-medical readers. Informed consent is a term in medicine for when doctors get the agreement of the patient to do something to said patient.  For example, before a patient is cut open for surgery, the patient has to say, “Yes I want to be cut open and have x happen.” Less extreme examples abound: the patient has to consent to anything from a blood draw for a lab test to a CT scan.  Part of informed consent is that the patient has to be informed.  It is acceptable for a patient to say, “Tell me nothing, just do it,” but the patient has to be offered information regarding their disease as well as the risks and benefits of the procedure they are consenting to.  For example, “This x-ray will tell us whether or not you have pneumonia or something else, but may slightly increase your risk of cancer in the long run.  I recommend you get it.  Do you agree?” But here’s the thing: I increasingly think informed consent is a chimera, a concept more than a concrete thing.  I believe it is whatever the provider wants it to be. As an example, consider this case that I recently saw on the wards. One day on call, my team had a patient in labor with pre-eclampsia superimposed upon hypertension.  Pre-eclampsia is a condition in which the pl...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Physician OB/GYN Source Type: blogs