2. Consent must be "informed"
- Patients must have enough information to understand their treatment and make a good choice. Your book lists six points that each patient must understand in order to be properly informed.
- The nature of the condition: Ex: Is there decay present, a fracture in the tooth, the tooth is dying, the tooth is unrestorable due to a combination of factors.
- The recommended treatment: Ex: The dentist will make his or her best recommendation to treat the patient's needs.
- The risks involved: There is almost no dental treatment that comes without risks. For instance whenever a filling, crown, or veneer are placed a tooth can die from trauma. This can lead to a future root canal, post, and crown at the patients expense. Most risks are difficult if not impossible to prevent even with the greatest of care. Patients need to know this.
- The chances of fail: Every dentist takes the greatest of care to treat their patients with excellent dentistry to the best of their ability. However, treatments can fail.
For instance a very nice lady who a dentist had been seeing for years decided to have a implant placed in her jaw by an oral surgeon. She was told all of the risks, and ended up with nerve damage on one half on her lower face that is and will continue to cause her pain for the rest of her life. While trying to treat the pain with prescriptions pain killers, she became addicted to pain medication and has ended up in divorce, lost her job and her children. This is a very tragic story that is very uncommon.
- The likely results if the patient remains untreated: Patients need to know what will happen if they choose to not follow the dentists recommendations
- The alternative procedures/options that also may work: It is important to give a patient choices in their own care. Some may not have the money to have the best treatment, so they may have to settle for second best. A patient that has choices, takes ownership over their own care and future dental work. They also take ownership over their choices, if they wish in the future that they had made a different choice.
It is also important not to assume a patient does or does not have the money for treatment. A dentist cannot offer to extract a tooth and not offer a root canal for a patient purely on the basis that they have no car or home or they come in looking ill-kept and their clothes have holes in them and are dirty. The dentist must always offer treatment options whether it be to have a root canal or an extraction or do nothing. It must be the patient's choice to make.
Language barriers must be broken down when informing a patient of their treatment options, and is an obstacle in dental offices that do not have someone who can interpret for the dentist.
3. Consent is for a particular treatment or series of treatments
Often a patient may come in for treatment on just one tooth or maybe they may have many dental needs and a treatment plan is prepared and signed by both the patient and the dentist. If a single treatment is agreed upon, then the consent stops after that treatment is complete. However, if a treatment plan is created, both parties agree to see it through to the end. In other words the patient agrees to let the dentist do the treatments on him or her and the dentist agrees to perform the treatment on the patient. In the case of the patient, he or she is not agreeing to do the entire treatment with the dentist and can choose to go elsewhere to finish treatment if he or she desires. Often a dental office will receive payment for an entire treatment plan before it begins, so that the patient will see the treatment through to completion.
4. The dental act/treatment must be legal
5. Must not be obtained by fraud, deceit, or trickery