Arato v. Avedon

Opinion

ARABIAN, J.

A physician’s duty to disclose to a patient information material to the decision whether to undergo treatment is the central constituent of the legal doctrine known as “informed consent.” In this case, we review the ruling of a divided Court of Appeal that, in recommending a course of chemotherapy and radiation treatment to a patient suffering from a virulent form of cancer, the treating physicians breached their duty to obtain the patient’s informed consent by failing to disclose his statistical life expectancy.

As will appear, we conclude that the Court of Appeal erred in…