Bioethics: Informed Consent, Epistemic Justice, and Disability Studies

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the historical, legal, philosophical, and ethical dimensions of informed consent, clinical disclosure standards, epistemic justice, and disability bioethics.

Informed consent

The process through which a patient receives relevant information about a medical intervention, understands that information, and voluntarily authorizes or agrees to the proposed care.

Autonomy

The ability and moral authority of an individual to make self-determining decisions about their own life and body, substantially free from controlling influences.

Beneficence

The ethical obligation of healthcare professionals to act in ways that promote the health, well-being, and best interests of their patients.

Nonmaleficence

The bioethical principle obligating healthcare providers to avoid causing unnecessary, preventable, or unjustified harm to patients.

Justice

The bioethical principle requiring fairness, equality, and non-discrimination in the treatment of patients and equitable access to healthcare resources.

Medical paternalism

The clinical practice of overriding, limiting, or disregarding a patient's choices or preferences because the provider believes doing so benefits the patient.

Decision-making capacity

A clinical assessment made by healthcare professionals regarding a patient's ability to understand, appreciate, reason through, and make a specific medical decision.

Competence

A formal legal determination, typically issued by a court, regarding an individual's general legal authority and mental capacity to make binding decisions.

Physician-based standard

A standard of disclosure requiring doctors to provide the type and amount of medical information that physicians customarily disclose within professional practice.

Reasonable patient standard

A standard of disclosure requiring physicians to disclose the information that a hypothetical, prudent, reasonable patient in similar circumstances would deem significant.

Subjective standard

A patient-centered disclosure standard requiring physicians to disclose information tailored specifically to the unique needs, values, and concerns of an individual patient.

Therapeutic privilege

The controversial legal and clinical exception that permits a physician to withhold medical information when disclosure is reasonably believed to pose severe psychological harm to the patient.

Waiver

A voluntary and autonomous action in which a patient surrenders their right to make an informed medical choice and delegates decision-making authority to a clinician or surrogate.

Coercion

Controlling or influencing an individual's decision through the explicit or implicit use of severe pressure, threats, or physical force.

Manipulation

Influencing a person's choices by distorting their decision-making process through deceptive tactics, exaggeration of benefits, or intentional withholding of material risks.

Assent

An expression of agreement or compliance with a proposed intervention that does not constitute an authentic, intentional exercise of autonomous authorization.

Material risk

A potential complication or hazard significant enough that a reasonable person in the patient's condition would likely attach importance to it in deciding whether to give consent.

Transparency standard

Howard Brody's proposed model requiring primary care physicians to make their medical reasoning and rationale clear to patients, thereby fostering active questions and involvement.

Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital (1914)

A seminal legal ruling establishing that every adult human being of sound mind possesses the right to determine what shall be done with their own body.

Salgo v. Leland Stanford Jr. University Board of Trustees (1957)

A landmark court ruling that formally linked patient consent with a physician's affirmative duty to disclose relevant medical information regarding an intervention.

Canterbury v. Spence (1972)

An influential legal ruling establishing the patient-centered reasonable person standard for disclosure, ruling that patients must be informed of material risks regardless of customary medical practice.

Confidentiality

The ethical duty of healthcare professionals to protect private medical information disclosed within the therapeutic relationship from unauthorized disclosure.

Duty to warn

An ethical and legal obligation requiring clinicians to breach patient confidentiality when an identifiable third party faces a serious, imminent threat of harm.

Sense 1 informed consent

Faden and Beauchamp's ethical definition of informed consent as an autonomous authorization in which an individual acts intentionally with substantial understanding and freedom from control.

Sense 2 informed consent

Faden and Beauchamp's institutional definition of informed consent as legally or procedurally effective consent that complies with institutional rules, policies, and regulations.

Substantial understanding

Comprehending the clinically and personally relevant aspects of a medical decision without needing comprehensive knowledge of every biological or technical detail.

Voluntariness

The condition of acting with substantial freedom from controlling external influences, such as coercion, deception, or manipulative pressure.

Shared decision-making

A collaborative dialogue wherein healthcare professionals and patients mutually exchange information, values, and preferences to arrive at an agreed treatment plan.

Informed refusal

An autonomous, voluntary, and intentional decision by a patient with decision-making capacity to decline a recommended medical treatment after receiving adequate disclosure.

Burden of moral justification

The ethical requirement holding that institutions and policymakers must provide compelling ethical reasons whenever their institutional rules deviate from autonomous authorization.

Epistemic injustice

A moral wrong occurring when an individual's capacity as a knower, their credibility, or their testimony is unfairly degraded or dismissed due to prejudice.

Testimonial injustice

A specific form of epistemic injustice where a speaker is granted less credibility than they deserve because of identity-based prejudice held by the hearer.

Epistemic hierarchy

An institutional or cultural structure that prioritizes particular individuals or forms of knowledge as inherently superior while devaluing alternative knowledges.

Epistemic humility

A clinical virtue characterized by recognizing the boundaries of one's professional knowledge and maintaining openness to patient testimony and lived experiences.

Ableism

Beliefs, values, and systemic practices that treat nondisabled bodies and functioning as the standard and inherently superior, portraying disability as a purely negative state.

Medical model of disability

A conceptual framework viewing disability exclusively as an individual biological defect or pathology requiring medical intervention, cure, or elimination.

Distributive justice

The ethical principle focused on the equitable, fair distribution of limited healthcare benefits, services, and socioeconomic burdens across a society.

Reproductive autonomy

The capacity and freedom of individuals to make personal choices regarding reproduction, genetic testing, and family planning according to their own values.

Technological imperative

The institutional and cultural drive to implement and routinely use newly available medical technologies simply because they exist and are presumed advantageous.

Feminist standpoint theory

An epistemological theory arguing that marginalized social positions offer distinctive and critical insights into systems of inequality that dominant groups often overlook.

Epistemic privilege

An epistemic advantage held by members of marginalized groups regarding the nature of the social barriers, disadvantages, and discrimination they navigate.

Intersectionality

The framework analyzing how interconnected social categories—such as disability, race, gender, and socioeconomic status—compound to produce unique forms of discrimination.

Carrier screening

A reproductive genetic test that detects whether prospective parents carry specific recessive genetic variations that could be passed to offspring.

Prenatal genetic screening

Non-invasive testing conducted during pregnancy to calculate the statistical probability that a developing fetus has particular genetic conditions.

Prenatal genetic diagnosis

Diagnostic testing procedures performed during pregnancy to provide definitive clinical confirmation of specific fetal genetic conditions.

Preimplantation genetic testing

A procedure that analyzes embryos produced via in vitro fertilization prior to uterine implantation to screen for chromosomal abnormalities or genetic traits.

Disability (Reynolds)

A multifaceted human experience arising from bodily or psychological variations and their ongoing interaction with social and physical environments.

Disease

An objectively identifiable pathological or physiological abnormality diagnosed using medical criteria and clinical markers.

Illness

The subjective, personal human experience of feeling unwell, debilitated, or dealing with an underlying medical state.

Impairment

A specific physiological, structural, or psychological difference or limitation in bodily functioning.

Disability humility

Joel Michael Reynolds's concept emphasizing that clinicians must admit the boundaries of their disability expertise and actively learn from disabled individuals and communities.

Binocular view of disability

Erik Parens's framework advocating that clinicians integrate both the clinical/medical perspective and the social/lived experience perspective when assessing disability.

Epistemic authority

The recognition that individuals possess authentic expertise, valid knowledge, and credibility regarding their own lives, functional goals, and bodily experiences.

Lived experience

Firsthand, practical knowledge and insight acquired directly through personal engagement with a specific circumstance, condition, or identity over time.

Catastrophizing

A cognitive and clinical tendency to frame disability predominantly around its worst conceivable outcomes, loss of function, and unmitigated suffering.

Accessibility

The degree to which architectural environments, medical instruments, communication formats, and public services can be utilized by individuals with varied abilities.

Stigmatization

The social process of attaching negative stereotypes, disapproval, or disgrace to an individual or group based on an identified personal characteristic.

Disability theory

An interdisciplinary field of critical scholarship that analyzes disability as a complex social, cultural, political, and philosophical phenomenon.

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

A landmark federal civil rights law prohibiting discrimination against individuals with disabilities in employment, transportation, public accommodations, and governmental services.