Informed Consent

As a citizen I am always disturbed on hearing about violations of an individual's right to know what X, Y, or Z is doing to them and their bodies, because it is easy to put yourself in the victim's shoes and experience yourself squirm at the thought. However as a researcher I am even more incensed as I know that there are and need to be very strict guidelines that you must abide by when you deal with human beings in any sort of intervention.

A story in the Daily News and Analysis website on private hospitals in India testing patients for HIV without their knowledge or permission prompted this post...(I am trying to get a working URL for the article). The sheer ignorance and stupidity about testing every patient for HIV for the safety of hospital workers is a topic for another post.

It all goes down to the concept of ethics. You do not perform any sort of intervention on people, even if you think it is for the best, unless they give you their informed consent. Remember informed consent is not one word but two: a) People need to tell you, in a completely unambiguous manner, that it is okay to do what you want to do to/with them and (b) it has to be informed i.e. people have to know and understand what it is that you propose to do with them and why.

This is absolutely crucial in medical interventions...it does not matter if you think you are the expert, that people will anyways not understand, and hey you are doing it as God for their own good, you do not poke and draw fluid without first telling them what you are drawing it for. If that means you sit and explain what you need to do, you sit and explain.

Now this brings up interesting socio-cultural questions...is it common sense that informed consent is a necessity...or is it a regulated legislative guideline that you obey? In most cases, quite unfortunately, it needs to be the latter. There have to be strict legislative guidelines about what you can and cannot do.

Obtaining informed consent has to be an established legal necessity without exceptions. There should be no room allowed for ridiculous explanations about why it wasn't considered necessary to obtain consent.

Hmm, its time to look into India's legislation on informed consent...