JME40: Good medical ethics J Med Ethics: first published as 10.1136/medethics-2014-102308 on 16 December 2014. Downloaded from PAPER The impossibility of informed consent? Kenneth Boyd Correspondence to ABSTRACT medical ethics’ over the 40 years of the Journal’s Professor Kenneth Boyd, The problematic nature of informed consent to medical publication. Biomedical Teaching Organisation, Edinburgh treatment and research, and its relation to autonomy, trust and clinical practice, has been addressed on many University, Edinburgh, Scotland Surveying the scene: the law and ethics of EH89AG, UK; occasions and from a variety of ethical perspectives in informed consent to treatment and research
[email protected] the pages of the Journal of Medical Ethics. This paper Two early and wide-ranging contributions on medi- gives an account of how discussion of these issues has Received 1 September 2014 colegal and ethical aspects of informed consent developed and changed, by describing a number of Revised 26 September 2014 were made in papers by judge Kirby3 of Australia Accepted 23 October 2014 significant contributions to these debates which provide in 1983 and paediatrician Silverman4 of the USA in examples of ‘doing good medical ethics’ over the 1989. Both agreed that a paternalist or beneficence- 40 years of the Journal’s publication. based approach, in which the doctor recommends a course of treatment to which the patient either con- sents or refuses, had properly been superseded by THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF INFORMED CONSENT? an approach based on respect for the autonomy or Awareness that informed consent is problematic, in right to self-determination of the individual theory and in practice, was already evident in the patient.