Exploring consent for animal-derived products in surgery

Exploring consent for animal-derived products in surgery
Tega Ebeye, Chantal R. Valiquette, Natalia Ziolkowski
The American Journal of Surgery, 24 September 2024
Abstract
Informed consent is integral to the practice of ethical and patient-centered medicine. Barring specific life and limb emergencies where there is no capable decision maker to provide consent, surgeons typically rely on informed consent to decide on provision of surgical care. However, determining what constitutes informed consent – what risks are deemed material enough, how to appropriately weigh risks, benefits, and alternatives, as well as answering procedure-related questions – is ever evolving. An emerging area of discovery, with limited literature, has focused on how to obtain informed consent when animal-derived products (ADPs) are used. Here, ADPs include both human and animal-derived products used in surgery. As surgeons and surgical trainees, we have encountered different approaches to including ADPs in informed consent – from failure to discuss ADP use in general, to the blanket statement indicating the use of potential animal-derived products in surgery, to actually discussing and listing known ADPs like “nerve glue” and “AlloDerm” on the consent form – prompting our interest in this topic as it affects surgical practice and patient autonomy. However, while it has been argued that disclosing the use of ADPs is warranted under Beauchamp and Childress’ four principles of biomedical ethics, it remains unclear how detailed our discussions need to be to meet this ethical standard without creating undue burden, and potentially substandard care, for patients.