Before you decide
Informed consent: what it is, and what it is not
The rule in one line
No medical treatment can be started or continued without your free and informed consent. Law 219 of 2017 states this in Article 1. It applies to a surgical procedure as well as to a hyaluronic acid injection.
What you have the right to know
The same law lists the information you are entitled to, and requires it to be complete, up to date and understandable to you:
- la diagnosi e la prognosi;
- i benefici e i rischi del trattamento proposto;
- le possibili alternative;
- che cosa succede se rifiuti, o se ci rinunci dopo.
The last two lines are the ones almost nobody asks about, and they are the most useful: the alternative and not doing it at all are two real options, and they must be presented to you as such.
You can also choose the opposite: not to receive the information or to designate a trusted person to receive it on your behalf. This is also your right and must be documented in your medical record.
How it must be collected
In writing (or by video recording, or with tools suited to people with a disability), and it ends up in your clinical record. If you are asked for consent only out loud, and nothing else is written down anywhere, something is missing.
You can change your mind. Always
You have the right to refuse all or part of the treatment and to withdraw consent at any time: even after giving it, even if withdrawing it stops the treatment. You don’t have to justify your decision.
Why it’s stricter in aesthetic medicine
An aesthetic treatment is performed on a healthy person and is not medically necessary: no one is treating a disease. That’s why courts require aesthetic doctors to provide more rigorous information than elsewhere: they must account for outcomes you may dislike, not just clinical complications.
And what it is NOT
It’s not a waiver. Signing does not remove responsibility from the physician or make you waive any rights. In fact, poorly collected informed consent is itself a physician’s issue, regardless of how the treatment went.
It’s not a one-size-fits-all form. A form that could be signed by anyone for anything hasn’t informed you of anything.
From here
Questions to ask before a treatment: the same things, turned into questions you can put to the doctor during the visit.
The medical register, and how to consult it: the consent is valid if the person asking for it is the doctor who will carry out the treatment.