sician in the community, of like training, would customarily disclose under the same circumstances. Gassman v. United States, 589 F. Supp. 1534 (M.D. Fla. 1984); 1 Med. Malpractice ¦ 8.06. The second, or "prudent patient" standard says that the duty to disclose depends upon the lay standard of reasonableness, set independently of the medical community. Under this standard, the physician must disclose information which is material to the patient's decision to accept or decline a particular treatment. The patient is not required to present expert testimony to prove that the physician did not provide the necessary information; the jury must determine whether the physician's disclosure was reasonable under the circumstances. 1 Med. Malpractice ¦ 8.06; see Harnish v. Children's Hosp. Medical Center, 387 Mass. 152, 439 N.E.2d 240 (1982).
The area of artificial organ transplants is still new; there are few cases in which the patient or his family have claimed that the physicians involved did not provide enough information as to the risks involved in such operations. In Karp v. Cooley, 493 F.2d 408 (5th Cir. 1974), the family of the deceased patient argued that the physicians should have informed the patient of all the tests run with animals and of all the potential risks to other organs. Applying the professional standard, the court held that this was not necessary and that the alleged failure to provide informed consent was not the proximate cause of the patient's death in any case.
The problem of consent in cases involving artificial hearts is a conventional one, in that there are no issues involving d
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