Abstract
Informed consent is not just a basic ethical principle, it is a precondition for any medical or surgical procedure or diagnostic test. This means it is not a choice: it is mandatory in all areas of healthcare. Yet, in CAM, informed consent is often neglected. A survey of UK chiropractors, for instance, showed that only 23% always discuss serious risks of their treatments with their patients.
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Notes
- 1.
Chiropractors are not alone: the Canadian survey also revealed that most naturopaths, acupuncturists and homeopaths offer to diagnose or treat asthma.
- 2.
In conventional medicine, it is usual to ask for explicit (often written) consent where a diagnostic procedure carries a significant risk of serious harm to the patient (e.g. exploratory surgery under general anaesthesia); by contrast, implied consent is generally deemed acceptable for low risk, non-invasive procedures (e.g. taking a sample of venous blood). In the latter case, the patient’s behaviour (i.e. not refusing the procedure) is considered to be sufficient evidence of consent. But in all cases, it is necessary that the patient has been provided with a sufficient explanation of the diagnostic procedure, otherwise consent will not be ‘informed’.
- 3.
One may ask: why would one group of CAM practitioners (in this case chiropractors) adopt diagnostic methods from a fundamentally different CAM modality? After all, there is no obvious logical link between chiropractic conceptions of disease (i.e. subluxations, blockage of spinal segments, etc.) and the notion that iris colouration reflects bodily components. The answer, we believe, lies in the irrational mind-set of the CAM practitioner: freed from the normal imperatives of requiring plausibility and evidence, it becomes easy to uncritically accept superficially appealing yet fundamentally defective medical notions.
- 4.
A related issue is the notion of conventional medicines as poisons: this mantra is frequently used by CAM proponents to alienate consumers from real healthcare and encourage them into the open arms of quacks.
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Ernst, E., Smith, K. (2018). Informed Consent. In: More Harm than Good?. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69941-7_5
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