If your health care worker wants to test or treat you, they must ask for your consent first. Informed consent is when you clearly understand your illness or health problem, and agree to what your health worker is going to do.
is it important that a doctor verbally explain all the risks/benefits of an upcoming procedure, or is it enough to just get the patient to sign the paper? If a doc writes in his notes that he verbally described the risks/benefits and the patient agreed, when in fact, the doc DID NOT verbally explain the risk/rewards is this consider falsifying a medical record? thanks!
When considering informed consent, the goal is to restore the patient’s autonomy, however, controversy arises when the physician believes that the patient cannot handle the bad news and will become progressively worse or the patient is not in a stable mental or physical state, causing poor decision making and incompetence. When defining informed consent, there is a strong argument for the presence of not only the patient’s allowance for certain medical procedures to occur, but also their authorization. Kantian ethics would support this if the patient holds up the end of the bargain that says that they fully understand the risks and will take responsibility partially, therefore fulfilling their duty. Connecting transparency to informed consent is a step in the right direction of giving more power to patients in regards to their own medical care. However, ethics of care would not be supportive of the transparency standard because under this theory, physicians will likely only answer the questions that will not psychologically harm the patient, therefore not following total transparency.
