The informed consent in medicine is the acceptance that the patient expresses a medical treatment, freely, and not mediated by anyone else, after being informed about the method of execution, the benefits, the side effects, and the reasonably foreseeable risks.
It is a real document with legal value (law L.219 / 17, article 1 paragraph 9), the purpose of which is to protect both the doctor and the patient from mistakes or misunderstandings: the Italian law provides that doctors and healthcare professionals can only treat a person if they agree and give their consent.
In the third paragraph of Law 219/17, the information that the doctor must provide are explicit: diagnosis, prognosis, benefits and risks of the diagnostic tests and treatments indicated, possible alternatives and the consequences of any refusal. The consent must always be acquired by the healthcare professional before carrying out any type of treatment.
A valid informed consent, therefore, must be personal, expressed directly by the subject; free, not conditioned by psychological pressures from other subjects; explicit, clearly requested and unambiguous; conscious, formed only after the patient has received all the information necessary to make a decision and specific, as in the case of particularly complex treatment, the patient’s acceptance must be directed towards these procedures, while a consent would have no legal value if completely generic.
A valid informed consent, therefore, must be personal, expressed directly by the subject; free, not conditioned by psychological pressures from other subjects; explicit, clearly requested and unambiguous; conscious, formed only after the patient has received all the information necessary to make a decision and specific, as in the case of particularly complex treatment, the patient’s acceptance must be directed towards these procedures, while a consent would have no legal value if completely generic.
For this reason, it is essential to reiterate the importance of the informed consent, not only from a medical point of view but also and above all from a legal point of view.
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