Medical Ethics and Informed Consent to Treatment: Past, Present and Future

Abstract

It has been asserted that there was an erosion of medical ethics during the Covid-19 pandemic and a departure from the principle of obtaining fully informed consent from patients before treatment. In light of these assertions, this article reviews the historical development of medical ethics and the approach to obtaining informed consent and critiques the consent practices before and during the pandemic. It then describes a new tool for displaying key statistics on the benefits and risks of interventions to help explain them to patients and suggests a more rigorous process for seeking fully informed consent in the future.