But why should we require informed consent, when it comes at a cost to the individual’s health? Why gives a single non-expert veto power to disallow even a mass of medical experts to make the final decision on matters that fall within their fields of expertise?
Edited in my own words so the summary is shorter and reads more natural
I hope that this summary is acceptably fair and complete though.
Nội dung
What is informed consent?
Informed consent is shorthand for informed, voluntary, and decisionally-capacitated consent. It is a legitimacy requirement for certain actions. Inadequately informed consent makes certain intrusions impermissible.
For and against arguments for informed consent
In here physician is a short hand for physicians and researchers, and patient is a shorthand for patients and research participants.
For
Against
Protect the patient’s health and welfare
The physician can be neglectful, overconfident or want to promote science or his personal career rather than her medical interests
The patient has other non-medical interests as well, and is typically the best judge of her own good and mind it far more than he does, even when he is convinced that he acts in her best interests
In cases when many physicians and patients are fairly certain that she is not making a good decision on her medical interests, then it’s unlikely that all of them are neglectful, overconfident or have hidden agenda
She can be biased and ignorant as well
She is not the only one who deeply care about her other non-medical interests. Her family, friends, and even herself before, can mind far more than her as well
Autonomy
Concordance between our care and our values is often key to our continued satisfaction and cooperation
Autonomy is inherently good for us. First, self-rule is central to a good life, perhaps because it makes us less self-alienated and more worthy of praise for our virtuous decisions. Second, autonomous choices promote our ultimate goals, on the non-controversial assumption that medicine affects non-technical and controversial matters of value and faith on which physicians are not experts (say, a Jehovah’s Witness’s faith), and the controversial assumption that these goals define how well our lives go
Kant’s formular of humanity: we should never act in such a way that we treat humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself We have an authority to determine our own actions
(Clearly an autonomy-based justification for the informed consent isn’t to protect her health, but more about a matter of respect for an autonomous decision maker’s refusal)
The cost of ensuring that a single decision is absolutely autonomous may be a severe, permanent, or fatal health problem
No theory of well-being—neither desire satisfaction, hedonic state, nor objective list—does it seem to follow that either informed consent or autonomous choice invariably makes one’s life better. And if they did, then it would be absurd to claim that informed consent and the principle of autonomy are distinct from, or conflict with, or even supersede, the principle of beneficence.
Kant associated respect for persons with treating them only in ways that they could possibly or rationally consent to, not with treating them in ways that they have actually consented to—rationally, voluntarily, or otherwise
Many gross violations of informed consent do not directly block our actions
Violating informed consent can have positive impact on autonomy. Sometimes closing off an option enables more important freedoms
Prevention of abusive conduct
A bulwark against such deontological offenses as assault, deceit, coercion, and exploitation
Physicians should make some effort to explain information again if they discover that their patients misunderstand crucial risks. Intuitively, this is so even if the patient was given an excellent explanation, one that worked with similar patients and which would rule out reasonable suspicion of deceit, exploitation, or fraud
Hardly leave room for strong reasons against coercive medical intervention when third parties perform the coercion; for example, against extracting a live kidney from a consenting patient who consents only due to her family’s coercion, yet such reasons are widely recognized
Trust
Ongoing societal trust in caretakers and medical institutions is important
What is likeliest to inspire public trust is unconditional commitment to one’s immediate patient’s alleged consent rights
Honor the trust that the patient has placed in the physician, and as part of the fiduciary role that the physician has undertaken
Intuitively, informed consent can remain necessary even when the public could never find out that a core violation of the requirement took place
Invasive interventions without a person’s informed consent are usually thought to wrong that person, not to wrong only the potential future victims of a decline in public trust
The backward-looking version of the trust rationale has difficulty explaining the need for informed consent outside pre-existing caretaker-patient relationships. Forced bodily trespass, for example, seems (not much less) wrong when it comes from complete strangers
Self-ownership
We are presumed to hold proprietary rights over ourselves and our bodies
Self-ownership may just mean that the individual should be the final arbiter in the relevant sphere, and that seems like a part of what informed consent requires—hardly an edifying rationalization for requiring informed consent
A further challenge is that the self-ownership rationale fails to clarify why touching sensitive areas of the body without consent seems worse than touching less sensitive areas without consent. Property violation is not usually a matter of degree
Why must physicians disclose and ensure our comprehension of information prior to intervention, something which proprietary rights seldom require? Indeed, the notion of self-ownership could be used against coercing doctors to give patients that information—because such coercion may violate these physicians’ self-ownership rights to interact as they will
Non-domination
No one should be under the arbitrary control of another and that informed consent requirements help to prevent such arbitrary control. There is a knowledge gap between them.
If so, then why would physicians and investigators who are closely monitored and cannot afford to mistreat patients also be obligated to let patients decide?
Personal integrity
One reason offered for keeping surrogate pregnancy contracts non-enforceable is the need to maintain surrogate carriers’ sense of personhood by never coercively taking babies away
Would this account condemn the use of a magic wand to treat an unwilling patient’s ailments without cutting his skin and so?
Would it also condemn threat of fines that coerces patients to move their bodies in certain ways, even without touching them?
When is informed consent necessary?
Robust informed consent that requires a great deal of information, voluntariness, and decisional capacity and is formalized and relatively non-waiveable, is necessary sometimes, but not always. Roughly speaking, robust informed consent tends to be necessary:
the more risky the intervention,
the more it is a high-impact,
the more it is value-laden and controversial,
the more private the area of the body that the intervention directly affects,
and the more conflicted and unsupervised the practitioner.
On other occasions, the need for very robust informed consent, and indeed, for consent of any form, is lesser. On those occasions, high financial or other costs of robust consent procedures easily override that need.
Other points
Informed consent seems to be just a legal right rather than a natural right.
The very point of requiring informed consent, and hence what is fundamentally required and when, vary between domains.
Khi một người đã chịu nhiều nỗi đau đến mức một ngày họ bàng hoàng kết luận rằng họ không còn khả năng để hy vọng thêm một lần nào nữa rồi, thì toàn bộ thế giới xung quanh họ sẽ rùng rùng biến đổi. Một khi họ đã học được rằng mình hoàn toàn bất lực để thay đổi tình hình, thì kèm theo đó họ cũng sẽ có những niềm tin mới để hợp lý hóa sự cam phận của mình. Những niềm tin mới này - tuy gây hại - nhưng lại rất logic, khiến cho họ không những không có động lực để thay đổi, mà còn có động lực để không thay đổi.
Đã có hằng hà sa số những bài viết giải thích những ngộ nhận phổ biến, và cũng đã có hằng hà sa số những dự án thay đổi nhận thức cộng đồng. Nhưng cuộc sống đã cho họ quá đủ trải nghiệm rồi nên họ mới thành ra như thế. Giờ muốn họ thực sự suy nghĩ điều ngược lại thì cần cho họ một sự trải nghiệm mới nhiều gấp đôi, gấp ba. Nên nếu chỉ dừng ở việc hy vọng cái hiểu đúng sẽ đủ khả năng cạnh tranh với cái hiểu sai, còn bản thân những thứ đang dung dưỡng cái sai thì không bị đả động đến, thì chỉ là chữa phần ngọn chứ không phải phần gốc.
Nhưng liệu ai sẽ là người đem lại trải nghiệm nhiều gấp đôi, gấp ba cho họ, khi xã hội vẫn hằng ngày có những ví dụ để tiếp tục khẳng định niềm tin tiêu cực đấy? Tại sao lại phải trông chờ vào những thứ ngẫu nhiên, khi ta hoàn toàn có thể tạo ra môi trường phù hợp cho họ? Và nếu không ta thì ai, khi ta mới là người hiểu rõ họ nhất và nhiều động lực nhất để giúp họ?
Nếu trong tâm trí bạn cũng có một người mà bạn rất muốn giúp họ thay đổi nhưng cảm thấy bế tắc, chúng tôi muốn mời bạn gia nhập Mạng lưới người thân, bạn bè của người có niềm tin tiêu cực để phối hợp cùng những người bạn khác. Đây là các hoạt động của nhóm:
Hỗ trợ 1-1 cho thành viên
Thảo luận các kiến thức liên quan đến sự tác động
Thành lập một cơ sở dữ liệu những người có tiềm năng và sẵn sàng trợ giúp nhau tác động đến cá nhân và cộng đồng người có niềm tin tiêu cực
