What Killed Informed Consent?
By Julie PonesseJulie Ponesse February 5, 2024
What Killed Informed Consent?
By
Julie Ponesse February 5, 2024
In spite of all of this progress on the autonomy front, informed consent lost its footing in recent years due to an increasingly impersonal health care system congested by a growing number of stakeholders (including public health agencies and the pharmaceutical industry), overworked clinicians, financial conflicts of interest, and shifts in moral and political ideologies. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the traditional relationships of trust between particular physicians and patients wore thin, and the expectation of explicit consent gave way first to more tacit understandings of the concept and then to its near total erosion.