Headlines such as "Row over Orkney girl cancer jab consent" (The Times, 12 October 2008), "Doctor at centre of MMR controversy accused of paying children at party for blood samples" (The Guardian, 17 July 2007) and "Patients used as drug guinea pigs" (The Guardian, 9 February 2003) are rather extreme and, hopefully, rare examples that signal concerns about levels or absence of patient consent. The ethicist Jonathan Moreno suggests in a book review: "No principle is more identified with modern biomedical ethics than patient autonomy, and no doctrine is more central to its implementation than informed consent."1 Moreno emphasises the author's opinion that: "the problem is not only that informed consent is mostly honoured in the breach than in the reality, but also that theoretically recommended consent processes have been overly demanding".
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