Iranian Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine

Because of complications of medical treatments, informing patients about the rate of treatment success, potential risks, and side- effects, is considered as an indispensable part of treatment contracts. Patients' deprivation of this information can be considered as a major obstacle in obtaining informed consent. Clearly treatment without patients' or their legal guardians informed consent may lead to civil and penal liability for the physicians.
Consenting without getting enough information about the disease, and its treatment is the most important issue in this regard. Now can such consent be valid and legalize the treatment or not? In this article informed consent and the physicians duty of informing patients are compared in three legal systems of Iran, England and France and then the physicians' duty of notification will be analyzed and some suggestions for safeguarding patients rights will be offered.