The American physician is today besieged by economic and societal forces which conspire to weaken whatever equanimity he or she could once bring to the practice of medicine. In the latter realm, the threat of malpractice actions is ever-present. In this regard, negligence has long been the theory whereupon plaintiffs' attorneys seek to recover damages for patients' misfortunes in the medical sy...

Physicians and other professionals in the field of medicine have to perform invasive and non-invasive procedures on patients as part of their duties. There is a legal basis upon which these procedures are done; this is called 'informed consent.' Sociocultural factors have strong influence on the sick role. These factors influence the application of informed consent in Nigeria.

Kihlbom has recently argued that a system of seeking negatively informed consent might be preferable in some cases to the ubiquitous informed consent model. Although this theory is perhaps not powerful enough to supplant informed consent in most settings, it lends strength to Evans' and Hungin's proposal that it can be ethical to prescribe placebos rather than "active" drugs. This paper present...

BACKGROUND Treatment informed consent aims to preserve the autonomy of patients in the clinician - patient relationship so as to ensure valid consent. An acceptable method of evaluating understanding of consent information is by assessing the extent of recall by patients of the pieces information believed to have been passed across. When concerns are not satisfactorily addressed from the patien...

INTRODUCTION In settings with low literacy levels ensuring that participants are fully-informed before they consent to participate in clinical trials is a challenge. We explored the experiences and concerns of key actors in the informed consent process in two HIV clinical trials. METHOD Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 46 respondents including trial participants, research study ...

This article describes the ethical principles of autonomy, beneficence, and justice within the nurse researcher-participant relationship as these principles relate to the informed consent process for research. Within this process, the nurse is confronted with a dual role. This article describes how nurses, who are in the dual role of care provider and researcher, can apply these ethical princip...

The author summarizes emerging standards for informed consent as the underpinning of ethical research in humans.

Bioethicists have failed to understand the pervasively paternalistic character of research ethics. Not only is the overall structure of research review and regulation paternalistic in some sense; even the way informed consent is sought may imply paternalism. Paternalism has limits, however. Getting clear on the paternalism of research ethics may mean some kinds of prohibited research should be ...