Fulfilling the Underlying Purpose of Informed Consent to Research
To a great extent the underlying purposes of informed consent in research settings resemble those in the treatment situation. Informed consent promotes individuals’ autonomy by allowing subjects to make meaningful decisions about participation in research projects. Informed consent is also a means of reducing inequalities of knowledge and power in the researcher-subject relationship and thus increases the cooperation and compliance of subjects. Increased knowledge also enhances patients’ abilities to make decisions that will protect them from unwanted and undesirable intrusions on bodily integrity, perhaps of even greater importance here than in treatment settings, because of the sorry history of abuses inflicted on research subjects. As great as the similarities are between consent to treatment and consent to research, the differences are equally great. In treatment settings, as already noted, clinicians and patients are presumed to share the same goal: promoting patients’ health. They may disagree over the means, but a general coincidence of interests is ordinarily the rule. Charles Fried calls this confluence of interests the principle of personal care. “The traditional concept of the physician’s relation to his patient is one of unqualified fidelity to that patient’s health. He may certainly not do anything that would impair the patient’s health and he must do everything in his ability to further it”. The essence of this principle is that physicians will not allow any other considerations to impinge on their decisions as to what measures are in their patients’ best interests. Since the goal of scientific investigation is the production of generalizable knowledge, not primarily the promotion of individual health, the interests of subjects and researchers are not identical. Clinician-researchers who are providing treatment to subjects in their research studies may feel this clash of interests most acutely as steps taken to protect the generalizability of the data may conflict with the maximization of benefit to individual subjects (2). The need to take this conflict into account in the decisionmaking process is largely responsible for the differences between consent to research and consent to treatment.