Article Text
Abstract
The rule that one must obtain informed consent is well established in medical ethics and an intrinsic part of clinical practice and of research in biomedicine. However, there is a tendency that the rule today is being applied too rigidly and with too little sensitivity to the values that are at stake in connection with different kinds of research protocols. It is here argued that the quality of consent needs to be balanced against variables such as degree of confidentiality and importance of values at stake, in order to be ethically acceptable. Appropriate information and consent procedures should be adjusted accordingly. Three levels are suggested, ranging from extensively informed consent with both written and oral information, through informed refusal with only a limited amount of information given to, at the other end of the scale, just making relevant information available.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Request Permissions
If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.
Other content recommended for you
- The impossibility of informed consent
- Patients ’ perceptions of informed consent in acute myocardial infarction research: a questionnaire based survey of the consent process in the DANAMI-2 trial
- Some limits of informed consent
- Quantitative aspects of informed consent: considering the dose response curve when estimating quantity of information
- Children of the 90s: ethical guidance for a longitudinal study
- Protein - enriched, milk - based supplement to counteract sarcopenia in acutely ill geriatric patients offered resistance exercise training during and after hospitalisation: study protocol for a randomised, double - blind, multicentre trial
- A cross-sectional study on person - centred communication in the care of older people: the COMHOME study protocol
- NTNU intranasal naloxone trial (NINA-1) study protocol for a double - blind, double - dummy, non-inferiority randomised controlled trial comparing intranasal 1.4 mg to intramuscular 0.8 mg naloxone for prehospital use
- Improving the evidence base in palliative medicine: a moral imperative
- 2nd International Conference on Biomedicine and Pharmaceutics (ICBP) 2014