voyageur said:
However, conversely, the Health Act states that it is the duty of a health practitioner to engage in 'informed consent' - it is the law under the Act. The question can be asked, did nurse Swick violate the Act?
The issue of "informed consent" is a really sticky one.
There are different approaches to informed consent:
How much information is considered "adequate"?
How do you know when you have provided enough information about a proposed intervention? Most of the literature and law in this area suggest one of three approaches:
Reasonable physician standard: what would a typical physician say about this intervention? This standard allows the physician to determine what information is appropriate to disclose. However, this standard is often inadequate, since most research shows that the typical physician tells the patient very little. This standard is also generally considered inconsistent with the goals of informed consent, as the focus is on the physician rather than on what the patient needs to know.
Reasonable patient standard: what would the average patient need to know in order to be an informed participant in the decision? This standard focuses on considering what a typical patient would need to know in order to understand the decision at hand.
Subjective standard: what would this particular patient need to know and understand in order to make an informed decision? This standard is the most challenging to incorporate into practice, since it requires tailoring information to each patient.
Source
In the US most states use the "reasonable patient standard" - and under this standard the nurse might not have violated the Act, as the majority of patients don't want (or they don't know that they would want) to know the rare side effects.
The other problem is: how "rare" are rare side effects? Here the vaccine industry has done a marvellous job at obfuscating the issue, by shoving them under the rug. If you look at official statistics, "rare" events indeed are very rare, because officialdom does not acknowledge vaccine induced illnesses like autism or Guillain-Barre paralysis as a "side effect", but view these things as totally unrelated.
Here in Australia things are a bit more complicated, as the consent process requires a) that risks are divulged using the "reasonable patient standard" AND b) the "subjective standard" as well. While this approach is much more stringent, it has its own issues: Meeting the patient preoperatively for the first time - and for 15 minutes - how do I establish what his subjective standard is? This is, of course, impossible, so the determination will always be made
post hoc by a judge, as the medical practitioner lacks tools and time to be able to ascertain this.
The way I work around this issue is, that I always paint the worst case scenario, even if exceedingly unlikely - i.e. "in extreme cases you might die" sort of thing, which again creates its own set of problems.
I think it would be unfair to take the nurse to responsibility for this lax consent process -
the problem lies in the industry pushing their products aggressively, spreading misinformation at every level and silencing anyone daring to raise concerns about vaccines.
If nurse Swick did indeed read the "rare side-effects" from the package insert, she would be out of her job in no time.