The Consent That Wasn’t Given — And Perhaps Never Fully Can Be
March 29, 2026There is a moment in medicine we rarely question. A patient signs a form. A doctor proceeds. And we call it informed consent. We have built an entire legal and ethical architecture around this moment. We treat it as the threshold between lawful treatment and violation. Between care and harm. Between the procedure a patient chose and the one that was done to them. But what if the moment itself is a fiction we have all agreed to maintain? What if the signature we have placed at the centre of this framework was never really doing the work we needed…
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