Healthcare Today

Informed Consent: Understanding Your Rights As a Patient

Summary & Participants

Whenever you go to a hospital or clinic for a major procedure or diagnostic test, one of the many forms you are given to sign is an informed consent form. Many people sign it without much thought. What does "informed consent" mean? Join our panel of legal experts as they clarify this important medical principle.

Medically Reviewed On: May 07, 2008

Webcast Transcript

DAVID MARKS, MD: Hi, and welcome to our webcast. I'm Dr. David Marks. Very often you can't get doctors and lawyers in the same room together, but today I'm happy to have two lawyers help me talk about informed consent, because it's a confusing topic.

Joining me is, first, Aytan Bellin. He's a healthcare attorney in New York City. Welcome.

AYTAN BELLIN, JD: Thank you.

DAVID MARKS, MD: Next to him is David Hoffman. He's also a healthcare attorney in New York City. Thanks for being here.

DAVID HOFFMAN, JD: Nice to be here.

DAVID MARKS, MD: There's not going to be any doctor-lawyer jokes here.

DAVID HOFFMAN, JD: I hope not.

AYTAN BELLIN, JD: We try to avoid that.

DAVID MARKS, MD: Good. We've all given informed consent to be here. Now, what exactly is informed consent? This is a term that's bandied about a lot.

DAVID HOFFMAN, JD: Informed consent is really a process. It's a process by which a physician will tell a patient the risks, benefits and alternatives of a particular treatment that the physician wishes the patient to go through. So for example, if you're going to undergo surgery, the physician will tell the patient there's an X percent risk that the operation won't work or that you'll suffer some complication. The benefit is that you'll be all better -- your hernia will be taken care of, for example -- and he might tell you that there are alternatives -- you know, wearing a truss, I guess, although I don't think that that's the standard treatment anymore. But that's basically what informed consent is. It can take either written form or oral form.

DAVID MARKS, MD: Why did this come about to begin with?

DAVID HOFFMAN, JD: It really all started out of the law of assault and battery. The notion was that even a physician has no right to even touch your body without your permission. You have sanctity in your body, and if a doctor was going to do something to you, he or she ought to be doing that with your consent. But consent alone really doesn't mean anything, because when you're discussing performing a medical procedure, if the patient hasn't had the procedure explained to them -- not just explained in medical terms, explained in terms that the patient can understand so that they can decide, "Do I really want this surgery? How am I going to feel if at the end of the surgery I have numbness, or I lose the use of a limb, or if I wind up with a worse cardiac condition than I started off with?" The idea of informed consent is really embodied in the "informed" part; that is, that the patient should really know what they're getting themselves into.

DAVID MARKS, MD: Of course, "informed" means information, and doctors have a lot more information than they can ever give to patients. The list of potential complications for any procedure is this long. Is it fair to say that a patient can actually be informed when they give consent, be fully informed?

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