Still…Only One in Ten Doctors Obeys Informed Consent Law

     The Inner Compass Research Institute just released the findings of a survey they commissioned through an independent research firm about the practice of informed consent by doctors prescribing SSRIs, in particular. The results are available on the Inner Compass Insight Substack platform.

     Their representative survey of Americans prescribed SSRIs listed the major adverse effects of these drugs and then asked the study participants if they ad been informed of each of them. The list included withdrawal, sexual dysfunction, suicidal thinking, serotonin syndrome, and risk of bleeding. Only 11 percent of the respondents were informed by their prescribers about all the adverse effects they themselves cared about.

     More importantly, 44 percent of the respondents said that being informed about these adverse effects might have changed their decision to take the SSRI medication recommended.

      No wonder 80, million Americans are taking antidepressants today.

     The legal requirements for informed consent demand informing a patient of the reason for the diagnosis, the risks as well as the benefits of the treatment, the alternative treatments available with their risks and benefits, and the risks of doing nothing at all. Federal law requires a full enough disclosure that a “reasonable decision” can be made by a patient about taking any recommended treatment.

     In 1999 a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association also showed that only nine percent of all surveyed doctors fully applied informed consent protocol with their patients. The 1999 Braddock study analyzed 1,057 patient and physician encounters and evaluated 3,552 clinical decisions. The providers surveyed were 59 primary care physicians and 65 general or orthopedic physicians.

     Only 2 percent of the patients surveyed actually understood their recommended treatments. Despite a quarter century of research revealing more and more dangerous side effects to these drugs, only one out of ten prescribing doctors and psychiatrists obey the law and inform their patients of the major risks of SSRIs.

     Have these guys not been paying any attention at all over the last twenty-five years to the increasingly well known danger of these drugs?

     Do these guys even know they’re breaking the law?

     If that 44 percent of SSRI patients in the Inner Compass Initiative survey who might have refused their prescriptions after a full disclosure of their major adverse affects, we could have cut that 80,000,000 number almost in half.