Let's Talk Wellness Now

What is informed consent? What should you be told before a medical procedure? 

Do not miss these highlights:

01:14 Each of us has the right to receive information and ask questions about recommended treatments, so we can make an informed decision. 

03:26 The usual interventions occur in the process of informed consent.

04:56 Healthcare providers are supposed to assess the person’s ability to understand medical information and the implications of treatments. And are supposed to provide any alternatives to the treatment.

08:04 This informed consent hasn’t taken place with the jab that people have been getting.

10:48 Back in 2006, Dr. Deb’s husband broke his back at work and needed to undergo surgery, but unfortunately, the procedure has not been totally nor properly disclosed to her husband.

15:54 Doctors are not perfect. Our healthcare system is more than broken. In healthcare, they think people are stupid that they can’t understand things. 

17:39 If you’re going to undergo a procedure, or a provider recommends that you do something, don’t jump at it at the first chance, do a thorough research.

19:52 If your guts and instincts are not sure about the procedure, listen to that intuition, trust your God-given intuition.

Resources Mentioned

Whether you are recovering from an illness or just looking to maintain your current overall health, schedule a consult with us at Serenity Health Care  by calling  (262)522-8640 or visit https://www.serenityhealthcarecenter.com 

Transcript of Episode 183

0:02
Welcome to Let’s Talk Wellness Now, I’m your host, Dr. Deb, this is where we talk about everything wellness and learn to defy aging and live our lives on our own terms. Welcome back to Let’s Talk wellness. Now, I’m your host, Dr. Dub. And today I want to talk about informed consent. You know, there’s a lot of talks these days about informed consent around shots around procedures, and what exactly is it? And why do we need it? Well, informed consent is a big thing within the medical field. Now I have seen it change over the decades that I’ve been in practice. And for those of you who have heard me talk about this before, my husband was a victim of an informed consent issue, back in 2006. And I’ll tell you a little bit more about that in this episode. But first, let’s talk about exactly what is informed consent. Why do we need it? Why is it important? And what do we do about it? Because informed consent is not just about what’s recently going on in the world. Informed consent is about everything that happens within the medical field, and other fields to you know, the legal fields, our food source, all of these kinds of things, we have the right to know, what’s being done to us, why it’s being done, and how it affects us. And ultimately, that’s what informed consent is about. So when we talk about informed consent, from a medical standpoint, we’re talking about both ethics and law. Each person has the right to receive information and ask questions about recommended treatments so that you can make an informed decision. Now, this is supposed to happen between you and your provider. There’s a relationship that occurs when you see someone in the health healthcare field. And that relationship is supposed to foster trust and support with shared decision-making. Now, I’m sure a lot of you that are listening to this are thinking, well, that’s not happening today. And you’re right. It’s not happening today, like it happened, even 10 or 15 years ago.

2:46
I’m just gonna say it. It’s more of like a dictatorship out there in the medical world these days, I’m going to tell you what you’re going to do, you’re not going to ask me any questions, I’m not going to tell you the truth about what kind of complications you can have, in part because as a provider, I may not know what they are, because nobody told me and some providers choose not to go out and look for that information themselves. And therefore they can’t tell you anything. So that is probably one of the most frustrating things that I am seeing in medicine today. So the process of informed consent actually occurs when communication between the patient and the provider talks about a procedure, and the patient gets to authorize and or agree to have a specific medical intervention apply to them. Now, that’s where it’s supposed to be. But many of you know just like me, that some people will intervene. Like, if you’re choosing to not have a medical treatment for a family member, especially like a child, they will threaten to call social services on you and take your child away so that they can impose the treatment that they believe is the best interest for your child and your family. Now, do I sound I sound fired up in this and I am because it does? It upsets me that people think that they have a right to impose their beliefs on a particular person and a particular procedure or treatment. And that couldn’t be farther from the truth of what’s supposed to actually happen today.

4:55
So as a health care provider, we’re supposed to assess The person’s ability to understand medical information and the implications of treatments. And we are supposed to provide any alternatives to the treatment that we are proposing. So that you can have an independent voluntary decision as to whether or not you want to undergo this particular procedure or treatment. Well, first and foremost, there are very rarely ever alternatives offered. And at least what I believe as alternative and what they believe is alternative are completely different things. But that is a rarity that there are any alternatives offered for you. Also, we’re supposed to present relative information, accurate and sensitive in keeping the patient’s preference for receiving medical information. So, when we provide a diagnosis, we’re supposed to provide the nature and the purpose of the interventions, the risks, the burdens, and the expected benefits of all of the options, including forgoing treatment. Does that happen? Absolutely not, it doesn’t happen anymore. We are also supposed to document that we provided this informed consent in a conversation to the patient or the person who is making the medical decisions for that person. in some form, we’re also supposed to provide specific written consent to you, which almost always happens, but you don’t realize it, we we document that you have had informed consent, you sign a consent form that says you had informed consent, but I’m going to argue that steps one and two rarely happen. rarely happen I’m gonna say.

7:08
Now, in an emergency situation, this decision is urgent, like, if I walk in with a heart attack, they’re not going to give me all of this informed consent for 20 minutes and tell me if you you go through this surgery, or don’t go through this surgery, or you do this or don’t do that. No, because their job is to save your life. And unless you have a do not resuscitate, or you have somebody that can advocate for you that says you didn’t want this, they’re going to do it. To me, that’s a completely different situation. If I’m in a car accident, I go in, I’m unconscious, I really want them to save my life for the most part, right? I’m not going to be able to tell them that I don’t want to do something, you know if it’s going to cause nerve damage, or it’s going to cause this or that. But for any other purpose. Informed consent is supposed to take place. Now, has informed consent taken place? With the jab that people have been getting?

8:15
Now it hasn’t? Have you been offered an alternative? No, you haven’t? Have you been mandated to take something that is new to the market? Without understanding all of the potential consequences to it? No, you haven’t. You’ve been told there are no consequences. You’ve been told there are no problems. You’ve been told that there are no side effects, which are all lies, I hate to tell you, but they’re all lies. And you can say I’m a conspiracy theorist on this, but I’m not. I can show you the NIH studies that backup what I’m saying that there are cardiovascular problems happening, there are lung problems happening.

9:03
There are blood clotting issues happening as a result of this.

9:09
You can argue that they didn’t know that because it’s experimental. And I’m gonna push back and argue and say they damn well knew this was happening. It was in their study information they presented to the FDA. They knew this. You weren’t told about it. But you were forced. This doesn’t just happen in this instance of this day and age right now. This has been happening my friends for decades. Go to any provider and ask them for a procedure for something. Do they sit down and have a conversation face to face and say, hey, you know, we’re going to cut you open and when we cut you open, we’re going to remove your appendix and when we remove your appendix, your immune system is going to decline a little bit and you’re going to have a scar. And we could potentially perforate your bowel, and we could potentially cause a hemorrhage for you. And we could potentially cause nerve damage. And, and you may wish that you didn’t have this out. I’m just making up something right here. No, but those things don’t happen. You’re not told those things. You’re told, we’re going to take your appendix out before it bursts and you get a systemic infection. If you’re lucky, you’re told that and you’re gonna have a little scar, you’ll take a couple of days to recover, you’re gonna go home, not a big deal. That’s what you’re told. So back in 2006, my husband broke his back at work. And he was sent home to drive himself with a stick shift, never called, they never called the ambulance. At that time, to their defense, they didn’t know he had broken two vertebrae in his back.

11:08
But by the time we were able to get with a surgeon, it was probably six months or so after his accident. And they decided that he needed surgery, because he had two vertebrae that were broken. And the informed consent conversation went like this, we’re gonna go in through your belly, we’re going to put some plates and screws, and we’re going to put some chambers in, and we’re going to fix those disks for you. And that was the informed consent, we were sent home and told to watch a video of the procedure. And if we had any questions, we could talk about it at the next office visit. Well, needless to say, I have lots of questions. And I was patronized about the questions that I had.

12:07
And those questions weren’t answered adequately. But nonetheless, at this point, my husband had been in so much pain, that he decided to go forward with the procedure, we knew that he was going to have a cadaver donor for the procedure, they weren’t going to take his own bone from his own hip, they were going to use cadaver bone. What we didn’t know was that the surgeon had only performed this procedure once before, with a drug rep in place, and they he had not used this particular product before, this particular product was new to the market.

12:54
And by not combining it with his own bone, the cadaver bone would never have been activated. So it would never grow. And it would never harden in there. And we were also not informed that the drug rep was going to be assisting and performing part of the surgery with the surgeon. And so when he had his informed consent, just prior to going into the or it was while he was already prepped, while he was already given medication, while they were healing him into the or they through a consent format him and said Here sign this. And that was the extent of his informed consent. Now, the doctor argued that he gave us this wonderful presentation in their conference room or their boardroom, all about the benefits and risks of the surgery and what might happen to him. And that this was a cadaver bone that they were using. And it was all my husband’s fault that this procedure didn’t work because he was a smoker. And for those of you who are smokers, you understand what I’m talking about because everything is blamed on your smoking when things go wrong. And after doing much research about the product, I realized that we were duped and this product was never going to work from the beginning. They knew it was never going to work from the beginning. This product was never studied or tested. It was never even tested for HIV or hepatitis or cancer or anything. And the cadaver was harvested from any person regardless of what they died from. And this is still today, my husband’s back. They can’t remove it. And we have no idea when or if he’ll ever have a condition that he wouldn’t have been prone to before. And this is what I’m talking about with informed consent, all of these things should have been disclosed to my husband. Just like all of the things that could potentially go wrong with any injectable material should be disclosed to you.

15:30
I cannot tell you the number of stories over the last 25 years that I’ve heard from patients, that they have gone through the degree of disparity they have, because they underwent a procedure, and didn’t realize that they could potentially come out worse than they were when they went in. Happens all the time. Doctors are not perfect. Our healthcare system is more than broken. We have a problem today. In healthcare, we think people are stupid, and that they can’t understand things. And they don’t know anything. Because everyone has told people that nobody knows how to read be on a third grade education, and therefore everything needs to be written in third grade language. And you can assume that patients don’t care, nor do they understand what you’re telling them anyway. So don’t bother to tell them. It saddens me to think that we assume people are stupid in this world, because they’re not. We know how to find information. We know how to interpret information. And if we don’t understand it, we know who to go to, to have them explain it to us. So we do understand it. And it’s no different than what we did in the 50s to certain segments of the population, assuming that they’re too dumb to understand, and they won’t care anyway. And we robbed them of their livelihoods, and we’ve robbed them of their health, and we use them to experiment on and we’ve never apologized.

17:19
It is sickening to me. And it saddens me, too. Talk like this and share this about my profession. But I’m sorry to tell you it is the truth today. So what can you do about it? Well, you can ask the important questions, you can prepare for information. If you’re going to undergo a procedure, or a provider recommends that you do something, don’t jump at it at the first chance, tell them that you need to look into this, you need to do some research, you need to figure out if this is what you really want to do. And then go home. And yes, I’m going to tell you to use Dr. Google and start looking for some information. With one caveat. Be careful what you read. Google is censored these days, it is not all the information that’s out there, it is only one side of the information that is out there. And I hate to say it, but DuckDuckGo is not any better. They are censoring information as well. So before, when you could research and you could go through the first two or three pages to find the information that you’re looking for. So true anymore, you’re gonna have to dig deeper, you’re gonna have to go to page eight, nine or 10, because of how Google is indexing things, they will only let mainstream stuff on the first few pages. So if you want to know the real information, you’re gonna have to dig a little deeper, you may have to use some alternative news sources. You might have to go to rumble, you might have to go to YouTube and find those people that haven’t yet been censored. You may have to start talking to people, or getting a second or even a third opinion, which if you do that, you need to go outside of the organization that was making the first recommendation because if you don’t, whoever’s in that organization is going to give you the exact same information that that doctor or provider gave you because they don’t have choice whether they believe it or not. So you need to do your homework. You need to protect yourself. And then you can make an informed decision as to whether or not you want to participate in the treatment or the medical intervention that was recommended to you. And I just want to add this one last thing in your core of who you are in your gut instincts something is gnawing at you and saying, I don’t know about this. I’m not sure about this. I’m uncomfortable about this. Please, please, I beg you. Listen to that intuition. Trust your God given intuition. Don’t let somebody bully you. Don’t let somebody tell you that you have to do this, or else, you have to do this, or you can’t see your grandchildren, you have to do this, or I’m not going to let you in my house.

20:38
No. Because guess what? when you do this, and your body is affected, and you’re the one that sitting there, debilitated, or ill, or not able to function the way you did before that medical intervention, do you think they’re going to be there for you? Do you think they’re going to come and help you? Do you think they’re going to pay your medical bills? They’re not. They’re not even going to believe you. And you’re going to be left alone anyway. It’s human nature. When my husband got ill, his own family turned on him. didn’t believe him, told him that he this was all in his head. The man couldn’t work, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t stand.

21:35
And they said, Well, you know, you go get a job at McDonald’s. Everybody can work at McDonald’s. Anybody could do that you have to do something to support your family. There isn’t that compassion that you want to be there at these times. Unfortunately, I’m not saying everyone. I’m not saying all people will be this way. But I’ve been in this business a long time. I’ve heard a lot of stories. And I can tell you for every one story that I hear that a family stood behind somebody. I can tell you 10, where they’re not. And these are not dysfunctional families. These are not families that don’t get along. My husband’s family loves each other. I love my inlaws, we get along great. But during this time, wasn’t so great. Because everybody has their own viewpoint. Everybody has their own belief. And the unfortunate thing is, not everyone knows what you know. And most of us don’t share everything. For a variety of reasons, we keep things private.

22:49
And that is okay. So, I don’t want this to be a negative podcast, and it sure feels like it. And I apologize because normally, our shows are not like this. But I want you to be informed, I want you to be prepared. And I want you to be armed to do something that could protect you and your family.

23:19
You don’t have to do the medical treatments that somebody recommends to you, you have a right to say no, you have a right to an alternative. Whether it’s alternative medicine, whether it’s a second opinion with a different alternative of treatment, whether you want to fly out of the country and get different treatment, or whether you want to do no treatment. It is completely your choice. Your body, your choice, right, that goes for everything. Not just what’s convenient for our government or for our healthcare system, or for a family member. So it’s not true.

24:04
So educate yourself. Listen to shows like ours. listen to other people’s medical shows, understand and know learn about your body, learn about the therapies that are available, learn about the new technologies, learn the good and the bad. So that you can have that conversation when you need to have that conversation with somebody about your health and well being and you can take your health and your well belly into your hands. So you don’t have to depend on the medical system to cure you or heal you or give you a treatment. We have lost this today. Our young people today, at no fault of their own parents do not know how to care for themselves. We have not taught them how to take care of themselves when they’re sick. We have not taught them how to live Look at their food sources and what’s in their food source and why they’re feeling bad because all they’re doing is eating crap. We have not taught them the skills that they need to stay healthy and heal themselves. That is why they’re dependent on the medical system. And that is why this is happening today. We need to go back to survival, we need to go back to teaching the basics to our children and our grandchildren. So that they don’t need this medical system in the way that they do today.

25:37
I know there’s going to be people out there that are going to argue with me about this, but I’m sorry, I truly believe this. We are here as a medical society for you when you need us when you can’t fix yourself. When you have something beyond taking a Tylenol, going to bed, eating well resting, doing some old fashioned remedies to make yourself better.

26:03
But we need to know how to take care of ourselves first. It’s just my opinion, it’s just my belief. And I hope that out of this, you have learned exactly what informed consent is, or if nothing else, I’ve intrigued you enough to start looking into exactly what informed consent is. I’ve written a book about this, it’s called the dark side of injury. It explains informed consent, how to navigate the healthcare system, how to navigate the work comp system, why it’s against you, and how to fight against it. I want you all to be able to defend yourselves, in the medical world, prepare yourselves, we’re going to need it. We need to know how to take care of ourselves and our loved ones. Our medical system is failing us has been for a long time. I’m hopeful that a new medical system will arise from all of this and be the health care that we want it to be that it used to be that we deserve it to be and that it truly heals us and makes us whole again.

27:36
So with that, I will leave you with one thought. Your body is amazing. Your brains are there you can learn anything. Do what’s right for you and your family. Take care of yourselves Be safe, be well and fuel your body with healthy, strong, wonderful, whole food so that you don’t have to use the medical system in the future. Hey, it has been really great sharing this time with you guys on the Let’s Talk Wellness Now podcast. If this episode has helped you or you feel as though this episode would help someone else we’d love for you to leave us a review. Share this podcast and if you don’t want to miss the most exciting episodes we have coming. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Google Play. Until next time, live every day to the fullest

Transcribed by https://otter.ai