Informed consent in medicine: ethical and juridical aspects

Contemporary medicine opens up new avenues for diagnosis and therapy, and in doing so it also makes available a huge amount of information about a person's state of health - information of immediate use, in the present, but also relevant to the future. This raises a number of concerns that take us beyond the province of medicine strictly construed. In other words, it will not suffice to involve the physician in putting that information to use through the practice of informed consent - by sharing and interpreting the information with the patient and making care decisions on that basis - for it will also be necessary, in this process, to think about the whole range of moral and legal issues arising out of the interaction and communication that goes on between patient and physician.
That is the premise for this current issue of Salute e Società, calling attention to the pressing need for a cross-disciplinary discussion among physicians, philosophers, and jurists in tackling questions such as personal freedom, the right to self-determination, the protection of personal data, the right not to know (especially in genetics), the spread of so-called defensive medicine, and the model we should adopt in enabling patients and physicians to share information and communicate in a way that supports the decision-making process.

Carla Faralli is full professor of Legal Philosophy at the University of Bologna, where she teaches Applied Ethics. Her investigations are devoted to the history of legal philosophy (she has edited the updated edition of the threevolume work by Guido Fassò, Storia della filosofia del diritto(Laterza 2008), and published La filosofia del diritto contemporanea: I temi e le sfide (Laterza 2009, now in its 10th edition)) and to gender studies and law & literature. And in recent years she has been engaging in the contemporary ethical debate on the challenges posed by the biotechnologies. She is editor of Ratio Juris: An International Journal of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law. She holds a position as academic advisor on the bioethics curriculum of the Doctoral Programme on Law and Technology in Bologna. And she also sits on three ethics committees: those of the Sant'Orsola-Malpighi Hospital, of the University of Bologna, and of the Bologna Medical Association.