By Hendrickson Law | Medical Malpractice Attorneys for Missouri Patients
Before any medical procedure, your doctor is supposed to explain what’s going to happen, what the risks are, and what your options might be. It’s one of the most basic patient rights in medicine — the right to make an informed choice about your own body.
Yet in practice, “informed consent” is often treated as a paperwork exercise. A nurse hands you a form, you sign it, and the surgery moves forward. But what happens when the doctor never actually told you the risks, alternatives, or even who would be performing the procedure?
At Hendrickson Law, we’ve seen too many patients harmed because they didn’t receive the whole truth — and didn’t get a real chance to make an informed decision.
“Informed consent” is not just a formality. It’s a conversation between doctor and patient.
Under Missouri law and national medical standards, doctors must clearly explain:
Your diagnosis and the proposed treatment or procedure
All significant risks and potential complications
Any reasonable alternatives, including doing nothing
Who will actually perform the procedure, including whether residents, assistants, or students will be involved
Expected recovery, limitations, and long-term impact
Only after this discussion — and your understanding of it — does signing a consent form have meaning.
Here are some of the most common ways informed consent fails in real cases we’ve handled:
The doctor sends in a nurse or staff member with a stack of forms. You sign without a conversation, often minutes before surgery. Despite the lack of an actual discussion, records usually include boiler-plate language about the informed consent process which often didn't occur or not in the detail recorded in the records.
Patients aren’t told about non-surgical options, conservative therapy, or other less risky treatments.
Doctors gloss over serious but uncommon complications, leading patients to believe the procedure is “routine.”
Especially in orthopedic and spinal procedures, surgeons sometimes overpromise results — suggesting guaranteed improvement when the odds of success are far lower.
When patients are harmed under these circumstances, the law recognizes that the injury is not just physical — it’s also a violation of their right to control what happens to their own body.
In Missouri the test is what a reasonable patient would have wanted to know in making the decision to undergo treatment.
If a doctor fails to disclose risks or alternatives that a reasonable person would consider important — and injury results from that undisclosed risk — it can form the basis for a medical malpractice claim for lack of informed consent.
Informed consent protects more than legal rights — it protects trust.
Patients don’t expect perfection. They expect honesty.
When doctors rush the process or keep key information from their patients, they take away the patient’s most basic right: to make their own choice about their own body.
If you feel blindsided by your outcome or were never truly told the risks of your procedure:
Request your medical and surgical consent forms
Write down exactly what you remember being told (and by whom)
Consult a malpractice attorney experienced in informed consent cases
At Hendrickson Law, we work with medical experts to determine what should have been disclosed and whether the risk that caused your injury was hidden, minimized, or never mentioned at all.
Call Hendrickson Law today at (314) 721-8833 or visit www.hendricksonlaw.com for a free consultation.
You have the right to know what was done to you — and who made that decision. If that right was taken away, we can help you get answers and accountability.
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