(HealthDayNews) -- The principle of informed consent means that, as a patient, you understand the nature of the medical care you're going to receive and accept the risks involved.
That's the principle. In practice, some of those "informed consent" forms are as hard to understand as an insurance policy.
The University of Minnesota reviewed some of the consent forms and compared them to other writing using the Fry scale. The higher the score, the harder something is to understand. Here's what researchers reported in the American Journal of Medical Sciences:
- The average Ann Landers column has a Fry score of 7.67, which means that 75 percent of the population can understand it.
- Reader's Digest has a score of 9.95, and can be easily understood by 69 percent of the population.
- But the informed consent forms, the ones that you bet your life on, had a score of 15.03. That means only about 37 percent of the people reading them could understand what they were all about.
