Informed consent: revisiting the issues.

Informed consent has been widely discussed in the ethics, legal, research, and clinical literature. Authors have addressed the ethical and legal bases for informed consent, its components, and its implementation both in research and in healthcare delivery. However, although there is considerable literature on the subject and the inclusion of this content within the curricula of the various schools of the health sciences, questions continue to arise regarding the process of informed consent and whether the person's right to self-determine was actually upheld. This article revisits issues of informed consent as related to research with human subjects and briefly defines informed consent, addresses selected issues, and offers some potential strategies to improve the process of obtaining informed consent when conducting research with human subjects.