Lack of Informed Consent

Informed consent is one of the most important aspects of medical treatment. When you give informed consent, you understand and agree to a treatment before it is administered. During the consent process, your doctor must divulge all major risks of a procedure to you before performing that procedure. If you agreed to a medical procedure without understanding what was to happen or knowing that other options were available, the physician or hospital may not have gotten the informed consent required.

At Kocian Law Group, our medical malpractice attorneys in CT can help you seek justice. If you were injured due to a lack of informed consent, you deserve compensation.

To obtain informed consent, doctors must inform you of all “likely” or “important” risks, but not of every possible risk. However, it can be difficult to determine what constitutes an ‘important’ risk. Different patients have different risk factors, depending on their personal histories. In addition to this, some side effects or symptoms can be life-threatening, but may only show up in a very small portion of the population.

Informed consent cases often turn on the question of whether or not a doctor should have disclosed the risk. At Kocian Law Group, we investigate with the aid of trained experts, finding out if other, similar health care providers would have given you this information. If they would have, it’s a sign that your doctor failed to relay important information.

Most informed consent cases require you to have suffered harm during the procedure to which you supposedly consented. However, an informed consent case can also be based on a situation in which a doctor says he or she will perform one procedure but actually performs another. For example, suppose that during a procedure to remove uterine fibroids, the physician instead removed a patient’s entire otherwise-healthy uterus. Informed-consent laws would apply if the mistake was deliberate or based on a good-faith mix-up, like an accidentally-swapped chart. If it was based on a medical emergency such as the discovery of a life-threatening infection, however, it may not be compensable under law. Informed consent does not necessarily apply to emergency situations.

Informed consent can be complex. Kocian Law Group is here to guide you through the process. We have decades of experience with medical malpractice. We can help you determine if you have an informed consent malpractice case and, if so, what you can do about it. Call Kocian Law Group for a free consultation today.