Personalized Disclosure by Information-on-Demand: Attending to Patients' Needs in the Informed Consent Process

Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 359-367

  Siegal, Gil ^a,b   Bonnie, Richard J ^a   Appelbaum, Paul S ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

^b GERTNER INSTITUTE FOR EPIDEMIOLOGY AND HEALTH POLICY RESEARCH   (Israel)

^c NEW YORK STATE PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; DOCTOR PATIENT RELATION; ETHICS; HUMAN; INFORMED CONSENT; INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION; LEGAL ASPECT; MALPRACTICE; PATIENT CARE; PATIENT PREFERENCE; PATIENT RIGHT;

DISCLOSURE; HUMANS; INFORMED CONSENT; MALPRACTICE; PATIENT PREFERENCE; PATIENT RIGHTS; PATIENT-CENTERED CARE; PHYSICIAN-PATIENT RELATIONS;

EID: 84864019502     PISSN: 10731105     EISSN: 1748720X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-720X.2012.00669.x     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. For a general overview of informed consent theory and practices, see J. W. Berg, P. S. Appelbaum, C. W. Lidz, and L. S. Parker, Informed Consent: Legal Theory and Clinical Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
2. R. R. Faden, T. L. Beauchamp, and N. M. P. King, eds., A History and Theory of Informed Consent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
3. Canterbury v. Spence, 464 F.2d 772, 781 (D.C. Cir. 1972). But see K. M. Boozang, "The Therapeutic Placebo: The Case for Patient Deception, "Florida Law Review 54, (2002): 687-746.
4. W. Levinson, D. L. Roter, J. P. Mullooly, V. T. Dull, and R. M. Frankel, "Physician-Patient Communication - The Relationship with Malpractice Claims among Primary Care Physicians and Surgeons, " JAMA 277, no. 7 (1997): 553-559.
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18. Ashe v. Radiation Oncology Assocs., 9 S.W.3d 119, 122 (Tenn. 1999).
19. For example, Wilson-Toby v. Bushkin, 72 A.D. 3d 810, 898 N.Y.S.2d 633 (2010). (Although consent forms advised the plaintiff generally that cosmetic breast surgery would result in permanent scarring, the court ruled that "consent forms signed by the plaintiff 'do not establish, as a matter of law, that the scarring that the plaintiff actually experienced as a result of the procedure was, in its nature and in its extent, consistent with the type of scarring that, prior to the procedure, the plaintiff had been told to consider as being among the reasonably foreseeable risks of the proposed procedure, or that a reasonable, fully informed person in the plaintiff's position would have undergone the procedure despite the existence of such risk.'" [citation omitted]).
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29. A federal judge recently struck down a key provision of Texas' new law requiring doctors to show pregnant women images from the sonogram and to play the sounds of the fetal heartbeat before an abortion, ruling that the measure violates the free speech rights of both doctors and patients. See Associated Press, "Texas: Judge Halts and Abortion Requirement, "New York Times, available at <> (last visited March 8, 2012).
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34. See Hall et al., supra note 25: "... at the same time that the IC process appears to empower patient participation, it may overwhelm some patients with more information than they want. Fully 85% of patients arrived in the clinic wanting to know as many details as possible about their health status, but after the clinic visit, only 25% continued to report this preference. At the same time, the proportion of patients preferring as few details as possible increased from 0% to 36%. These preliminary findings may warrant reconsidering the amount of detail disclosed in the iMed documents and the IC process."
35. G. Siegal and R. J. Bonnie, "Closing the Organ Gap, " Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 34, no. 4 (2006): 415-423. Seventy percent of people forced to state their position vis-à-vis organ donation in mandated choice pilot programs in Texas and Virginia chose not to be a donor.