Is the informed consent form only a symbolic document in clinical trials?

Is the informed consent form only a symbolic document in clinical trials?
Mini Review
Buket Gungor
Archives of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, 19 December 2022
Open Access
Excerpt
Being one of the basic principles of clinical research, informed consent is definitely a legal responsibility and ethical duty for health professionals. The purpose of obtaining informed consent is to enable the subjects to make an autonomous decision by providing them with accurate and clear information about the research at the stage of participation. Due to medical advancements and the increasing complexity of diagnostic and experimental methods in clinical research, the prepared Informed Consent Forms (ICFs) have become difficult to understand. Viewing ICFs as just a necessary legal and symbolic document of participation in research often results in an insufficiently informed consent process for subjects. Research shows that the rate of understanding the basic information in the consent forms prepared for the subjects participating in the clinical trials ranged from 52.1% to 75.8%…