Medical Law Consent

[College Class]

[Title of the Course]

[Instructor Name]

Medical Law Consent

It is the basic standard of medical ethics that patients have a right to give their permission before receiving any medical treatments. Requirement of consent is essential from patients, and the practitioner must obtain the consents in any case ranges from taking their blood samples for analyses or donation of a body organ. The law of consent is important in medical ethics as well as in terms of human rights. The validity of consent can be determined through three factors. The first factor is a voluntary action of patients. This means that patients must take the decision solely to consent or not to consent regarding the treatment. The friends and family pressure should not involve in their decision making. The second factor is the nature of consent, and according to medical standards it should be informed consent so that, it can help patients for taking their decision of consent to treatments. The patients must be given the complete information about the procedure of treatments including all the risks and benefits associated with this. The doctors must inform patients about the consequences if they do not receive the treatment along with the other viable alternatives. The third factor is the capacity of patients for talking the decision right for them after receiving all the complete information from the concerned people. If the patients have enough capacity to take the decision then their choice must be valued even if their decision would be in favour of their death.

Consents should be given to the physician who is directly involved in the treatments of patients. Consents can be given verbally, non-verbally or as a signature document form. Regarding major treatments like operations, the health physicians must provide the consent document to the patients prior to their treatment. Therefore, they use enough time to understand the context of consent for taking the appropriate decision. The patients should know the purpose of consent to a treatment. In the same way, it is also the chief responsibly of health physicians to provide all the comprehensive facts and should not withhold the information, just because this makes patients uncomfortable. The health care professional is ethically responsible for providing basic information like concise general idea of their condition, options for treatment and possible outcomes.

On the other hand, with respect to ethics and law consequences, the adults may have the right to decline for medical tests and life saving treatments. In most of the cases, adult patients do understand better then the health professionals that what kinds of treatment are suitable for them. For that reason, the law also considers the unwanted treatments as useless and a type of unlawful act. For instance, an old lady of 55 years suffered from cancer declined for additional treatments because she knew that the treatment at this stage could not help her out. Another example of 25 years old male who declined the recommendation of HIV test just because the confirmation of infection could make ...