Category: Informed Consent
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Dickson v Pinder: Chiropractic Informed Consent, the “Flippant Patient” Problem, and Whether Spinal Manipulative Therapy Caused a Stroke
Patricia Dickson had a knotted neck and a headache. A neighbour recommended his chiropractor, Dr. Ross Pinder, who had been practising in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta for over 27 years. She went on February 14, 2002. Dr. Pinder performed spinal manipulative therapy on her neck. She heard a crack. The original pain eased. She went home, made a follow-up appointment, and went to play bingo that evening. In the small hours of February 15 she awoke with a searing pain behind her left eye, profound dizziness, and her left eye "jumping up and down." Her husband drove her to the emergency room at Fort Saskatchewan's hospital. She had suffered a stroke.
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Hopp v Lepp: The Supreme Court of Canada’s First Ruling on Informed Consent — Duty of Disclosure, Specific Questions, and the Limits of the Obligation
On a winter evening in February 1974, Aron Lepp returned to his home in Lethbridge, Alberta after a long drive from British Columbia. The pain that came on that night was, by his account, excruciating, in his left upper thigh, hip, and groin, so severe that he had to crawl to his bed. What followed was a sequence of clinical events, surgical decisions, and a dispute about what a patient was told before he consented to an operation, a dispute that eventually reached the Supreme Court of Canada and produced the country's first authoritative ruling on the doctrine of informed consent.
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Reibl v Hughes: The Modified Objective Test for Causation in Informed Consent Claims — When a Reasonable Person Would Have Said No
John Reibl was a Hungarian-born tool and die maker who had worked on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company plant in Oakville, Ontario for more than eight years. He was about a year and a half away from completing the ten years of service that would earn him a lifetime retirement pension. He had severe, persistent headaches. He had been referred to Dr. Robert Hughes, a neurosurgeon who had discovered a significant narrowing in the artery that carried blood to the left side of Reibl's brain, a narrowing that permitted only fifteen percent of normal blood flow.
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