When Your Doctor Didn’t Tell You What Could Go Wrong

Informed consent requires healthcare providers to explain treatment risks, benefits, and alternatives before performing medical procedures. Patients must understand what they’re agreeing to and the potential consequences of treatment. When doctors fail to provide adequate information and patients suffer complications they weren’t warned about, lack of informed consent can create medical malpractice liability even when procedures were performed without technical errors. Understanding what information doctors must disclose helps you evaluate whether your consent was truly informed or whether providers violated disclosure duties.

Our friends at Manzoor Law Firm, Inc help patients who underwent procedures without understanding material risks that reasonable people would want to know before consenting. A personal injury lawyer experienced with these cases knows that informed consent claims require proving doctors failed to disclose risks that materialized and that you wouldn’t have agreed to treatment had you been properly informed.

The Basic Informed Consent Requirement

Informed consent doctrine recognizes patient autonomy in medical decision-making. You have the right to accept or refuse treatment based on complete information about what procedures involve and what risks they carry.

Doctors must provide enough information for you to make educated decisions. Simple consent forms signed without adequate explanation don’t satisfy informed consent requirements when forms list risks doctors never actually discussed with you.

The law requires actual communication about risks, not merely having patients sign forms acknowledging risks were explained when no meaningful discussion occurred.

What Information Must Be Disclosed

Healthcare providers must disclose material information including the nature of proposed procedures, the purpose and expected benefits of treatment, material risks of procedures including likelihood and severity, alternative treatments available and their risks, and likely consequences of declining treatment.

Material risks are those that reasonable people would consider significant when deciding whether to undergo procedures. Rare complications with severe consequences like death or paralysis are material. Common minor risks might also be material depending on their nature.

Doctors need not disclose every conceivable risk but must address those substantial enough to affect reasonable patient decision-making.

The Reasonable Person Versus Patient-Specific Standards

States use different standards for determining what information must be disclosed. Most states apply reasonable person standards asking what information reasonable patients would want to know before consenting to treatment.

This objective standard doesn’t depend on your specific concerns or questions. If reasonable people generally would want to know about specific risks, doctors must disclose them whether or not you asked.

Some states use patient-specific standards requiring doctors to provide information based on your particular situation and expressed concerns. These subjective standards better protect individual autonomy but create proof challenges about what doctors knew regarding your specific informational needs.

Common Informed Consent Failures

Typical informed consent violations include failing to discuss serious risks like nerve damage, infection, or death, not explaining that procedures are experimental or have high failure rates, omitting information about available alternative treatments, understating complication frequencies or severity, and failing to discuss doctors’ limited experience with specific procedures.

Each failure represents inadequate disclosure that prevents truly informed consent.

Emergency Exception To Informed Consent

Emergency situations where patients cannot provide consent and delays would cause serious harm create exceptions to informed consent requirements. Unconscious accident victims needing immediate surgery don’t require informed consent before life-saving procedures.

The emergency exception applies only when treatment cannot wait for consent without serious consequences. Scheduled procedures never qualify. Non-life-threatening conditions don’t justify skipping informed consent even if treatment is urgent.

Therapeutic Privilege Exception

Therapeutic privilege allows doctors to withhold information when disclosure would harm patients. If explaining risks would cause psychological damage interfering with treatment or recovery, doctors might justify nondisclosure.

This exception is narrow and controversial. Doctors cannot invoke therapeutic privilege simply because they think patients will refuse beneficial treatment if fully informed. The privilege applies only when disclosure itself would cause serious harm.

Courts skeptically review therapeutic privilege claims because the exception contradicts informed consent principles and creates paternalistic medical decision-making that modern law rejects.

What Informed Consent Doesn’t Cover

Informed consent requirements don’t apply to general treatment risks all medical procedures share like infection, bleeding, or adverse reactions to anesthesia. Patients are presumed to know these universal risks exist.

However, when general risks become more likely due to specific circumstances like compromised immune systems or medication interactions, disclosure becomes necessary.

The Causation Requirement

Informed consent malpractice claims require proving lack of disclosure caused your injuries. You must show you wouldn’t have undergone treatment if properly informed about risks that occurred.

This causation element creates difficult proof challenges. If you would have consented to treatment anyway despite knowing about risks, lack of disclosure didn’t cause harm because you would have accepted the risk.

Courts evaluate whether reasonable people would have proceeded with treatment knowing the risks. Your testimony that you wouldn’t have consented gets measured against what reasonable patients would decide.

Informed Refusal Obligations

Doctors must also obtain informed consent when patients refuse recommended treatment. This informed refusal requires explaining consequences of declining care.

If you refuse testing or treatment and doctors fail to explain what risks this refusal creates, they violate duties to provide information supporting autonomous decision-making.

Language And Communication Barriers

Informed consent requires communicating in ways patients understand. Using medical jargon without explanation or providing information in languages patients don’t speak violates informed consent requirements.

Doctors must use interpreters for non-English speaking patients and explain concepts in plain language accessible to people without medical training.

Capacity To Provide Consent

Valid informed consent requires decision-making capacity. Patients under anesthesia, heavily sedated, or mentally incapacitated cannot provide informed consent.

Obtaining consent forms from patients unable to understand information due to medication, pain, or mental state violates informed consent principles.

Consent Forms Are Not Absolute Protection

Signed consent forms don’t automatically prove adequate disclosure occurred. Courts examine whether doctors actually explained information listed on forms and whether discussions were meaningful.

Form signatures constitute some evidence of consent but don’t prove information was comprehensibly communicated. Patients testifying they didn’t understand explained risks or weren’t given time to read forms create fact questions about consent adequacy.

Time Pressure And Informed Consent

Rushing patients to sign consent forms minutes before procedures without adequate time to consider information and ask questions undermines informed consent.

Valid consent requires reasonable opportunity to deliberate about decisions and discuss concerns. Presenting forms as patients are being wheeled to operating rooms doesn’t allow meaningful decision-making.

Comparing Risks Of Alternative Treatments

Informed consent includes explaining alternative treatment options and their comparative risks. Presenting only recommended procedures without discussing alternatives prevents patients from evaluating different approaches.

If less risky alternatives exist that might accomplish similar therapeutic goals, doctors must disclose these options. Patients cannot make informed choices when unaware that safer alternatives are available.

Scope Of Consent For Extended Procedures

Consent for specific procedures doesn’t automatically authorize doctors to perform additional procedures discovered during surgery. Finding unexpected conditions during operations requires separate consent unless addressing them is necessary to prevent serious harm.

Surgeons who significantly expand surgical scope beyond what was consented to perform unauthorized procedures constituting battery even when medically indicated.

Proving Inadequate Informed Consent

Establishing informed consent violations requires medical records showing what information was provided, consent forms signed before procedures, testimony about what doctors actually explained, and medical professional opinions about what risks should have been disclosed.

We obtain medical professionals who review records and testify about whether disclosure met professional standards.

If you suffered complications from medical procedures you didn’t fully understand or weren’t adequately warned about, you may have informed consent malpractice claims even if procedures were performed without technical errors. Doctors who fail to explain material risks, alternative treatments, or likely outcomes violate duties to support informed patient decision-making. Understanding what informed consent requires and what information doctors should have disclosed helps you evaluate whether providers gave you information necessary to make truly voluntary and educated decisions about accepting treatments that created risks you were never warned could actually occur.