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O Neil's Concept Of Informed Consent

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O’Neil begins her article stating that as people, we experience informed consent everyday, within the daily activities of our lives. Then from this informed consent, there are different levels of this consent. The concept of genuine consent is O’Neil’s main focus in dealing with medical situations, and trying to ensure that patients understand what they are giving consent to, thus respecting their autonomy. The point of informed consent is to ensure that a patient is not being coerced and fully understands everything that they are agreeing to. O’Neil goes and focuses on genuine consent where a patient “(is) not coerced or deceived; yet they must not be overwhelmed with information” (6). Stating that a patient should not feel overwhelmed with information is establishing that there must be a balance where only relevant …show more content…

This type of consent is then “apparent where patients can control the amount of information they receive, and what they allow to be done” (6). However, while this type of consent does seem ideal, one has to question whether or not what the physician might see as irrelevant or ‘too much’ information, the patient might disagree. The patient and physician could potentially view things differently in terms of what would be helpful information, and if the patient was not told of a factor, how could they fully give their informed genuine consent? The physician and patient must ensure that they have a positive and effective dialogue to achieve O’Neil’s concept of genuine consent. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which was conducted in the United States not that many years ago, violated and harmed many individuals throughout the study. This study is even comparable to the Nazi studies done during the Holocaust, and even continued for 30 years after the Nazis were

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