[Informed consent: a pragmatic view].

Abstract

The author highlights some pragmatic aspects of informed consent that could help to bridge the gap between the currently valid legal requirements and the practical realities of providing medical information in Hungarian health-care settings. One of the crucial point of informed consent is whether the patient properly understood the provided medical information. Consequently, effective communication becomes an inevitable condition of providing informed consent. The results and insights coming from psychological research--concerning lay understanding of medical information, of the readability of consent forms, and especially of the lay understanding of statistical information, and risk communication--could help to create a better practice of medical communication that could satisfy both ethical and legal requirements. The author argues as well for creating more concrete and practically oriented guidelines concerning informed consent that would also help to increase the quality of medical information giving. These might help us approach the medical ideal that was conceptualised in the doctrine of informed consent.