BMJ 1998;317:947 ( 3 October )

Letters

Informed consent

    Numbers inform the debate
    "Technical" consent is inevitable in some circumstances
    Consent might have been obtained under duress
    Explicit consent is not needed for studies using medical records
    Screening programmes need consent forms
    Policy has loopholes
    Parents have views on how it should be obtained

Numbers inform the debate

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR---Smith's editorial recognises the complexity of the issue of informed consent and states that the BMJ is prepared to relax its absolutism.1 At the risk of being misunderstood I would like to attempt to construct a decision theory model based on certain explicit assumptions that may allow us to compute numerical values better to inform the debate. At the outset I accept the ethical principle of non-exploitation so beautifully described by Mary Warnock2; I also accept the importance of consumers' involvement (I was the founding father of the consumers' advisory group for clinical trials chaired by Mrs Hazel Thornton).

Let us anticipate 150 000 deaths from breast cancer in this country over the next 10 years and let us make the conservative assumption that we already possess a novel therapeutic adjuvant that in absolute terms would reduce the risk of death by 6% over this period---in other words, . . . [Full text of this article]
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