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Information, Decisions, And The Limits Of Informed Consent, Carl E. Scheider, Michael H. Farrell

Book Chapters

For many years, the heart's wish of bioethics has been to confide medical decisions to patients and not to doctors. The favoured key to doing so has been the doctrine of informed consent. The theory of and hopes for that doctrine are well captured in the influential case of Caterbury v. Spence: '[t]rue consent to what happens to one's self is the informed exercise of a choice, and that entails an opportunity to evaluate knoledgeably the options available and the risks attendant upon each'.