A medical doctor doesn't have the right to treat you without informing you about the important details of your treatment. That way you will be able to decline or consent to the treatment based on the right information. This means you can hire a personal injury attorney and file a medical malpractice claim against a doctor who treats you without your informed consent and you end up getting injured, you just need to prove these three things first:
Other Doctors Would Have Disclosed the Information
Some states will base their decision on whether other doctors would have disclosed the information to you or not. The court will consider your claim legitimate if it determines that other doctors would have made the same disclosure.
As you can imagine, in some cases at least, there will be doctors on both sides of the divide. In this case, it all comes down to statistical analysis to determine which is more likely than the others. In most cases, you will need an expert witness to explain that other doctors would have disclosed the information to you.
A Normal Patient Would Have Made a Different Decision
In other states, the crux of the matter is whether a normal patient would have made a different decision if the information had been disclosed to them. Consider an example where you are claiming that you wouldn't have undergone a spinal surgery if you had been informed about the risk of chronic back pain after surgery. In this case, the court will be interested in knowing what other spinal surgery candidates usually do when they are informed about this risk. It also matters whether the doctor informed you about alternative treatments that would have been safer than the surgery you underwent.
The Usual Exceptions Didn't Apply
Lastly, there are cases where a patient should not be told everything about their treatment even if the information is crucial to their treatment. For example, in an emergency situation, there might not be time to tell you everything to get your opinion. There are some medical emergencies where you don't even have the physical strength to listen to a doctor or give them your opinion on the planned treatment. There are also cases where you shouldn't be given all the information about your treatment because doing so would cause you severe emotional or mental distress (assuming you are already emotionally fragile). Therefore, you will only have a valid malpractice claim against the defendant if these exceptions didn't apply to your case.
