Question

What, according to Brody, are the accepted legal standards for informed consent? Identify one problem Brody identifies with the accepted legal standards for informed consent as he understands them.

Answer 1

1 community practice/reasonable patient standards of informed consent:

the physician should disclose what similarly situated colleagues would disclose in similar events

2.Problems with community practice and patient standards:

-What other physicians do may not serve patients needs

-The standard encourages the physician to lay out all possible risks, benefits, and alternatives

3.Conversation model :

a conversation is designed to encourage patient participation in all medical decisions to the extent that the patient wishes to be included

4.Advantages of a conversation:

-Most people have a good intuitive grasp of when one is finished

-Informed consent would be a mutual process (instead of a one-way disclosure of information)

5.Problems with a conversation:

-The inherent subjectivity of the model makes it ill-suited as a legal standard

6.Transparency standard

when the physician's basic thinking has been rendered transparent to the patient

7.Reasonably informed patient

allowed to participate in the medical decision to the extent that patient wishes

the physician disclosed the basis on which the proposed treatment or alternative possible treatments have been chosen

8.Advantages of transparency standard:

-Physician knows when they are finished obtaining informed consent

-It's better than listing irrelevant risk factors

-Patients have the right to ask for the extreme lists of risks and alternatives

-Revealing the physician's thinking allows patients to participate more