Yet in today’s environment of rushed medical visits and high volumes of patients for doctors to see, informed consent can be slighted. Patients can feel “not listened to” and hurried through without having their questions answered.

“Informed consent (IC) is a key patients’ right. It gives patients the opportunity to access relevant information/knowledge and to support their decision-making role in partnership with clinicians.”

“Actually, patients not only have the right to obtain all relevant information, both pro and con, but for a physician to prescribe and or operate without obtaining informed consent is medical battery,” Campbell-Taylor said.

“I have always found it amazing that people are quite content to have substances put into or taken out of the body without ever asking the most important, ‘Why and will it do any harm?’ The patient, not the physician, decides what will be done or ingested and the competent patient has the absolute right to refuse treatment even if it would mean death.

“Except in an emergency, a doctor, nurse, or therapist must obtain the patient’s consent before even touching him or her.”

When it comes to informed consent for research studies, consent from patients—who are called subjects—is much more complicated because of the higher risk of the protocols.

These consent agreements are governed by what are called “Institutional Review Boards,” usually affiliated with medical centers where the research will be conducted to ensure the safety and full knowledge of the participants.

Unfortunately, patients and doctors are often reluctant or uninterested in asking these questions.

“The millions of resultant tragedies [from medication use] every year constitute a disgrace for the medical profession that increasingly forgets to obtain data on the side effects of all medications, inform the patient, and stop relying on the information provided only by the pharmaceutical company representatives,” Campbell-Taylor said.

“I regret to say that much of the damage inflicted by adverse side effects of medications is the shared responsibility of physicians and the patients themselves who avoid obtaining essential information and thereby being unable to make reasoned decisions.”

According to Campell-Taylor, before a physician even touches a patient, he or she needs permission. However, she noted that physician exams seem to be disappearing in favor of routine drug prescribing.

“It has been years since I have heard a patient tell me that they were actually examined [by a  physician] as opposed to merely talked to ... [leaving] with a prescription in hand,” she said.

“Few Americans realize that the United States ranks last in health care rankings compared with Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.”

The researchers said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s method of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on death certificates and called for changes to how deaths are reported to better reflect reality.

While the Hopkins researchers said those errors include systemic problems, such as “poorly coordinated care, fragmented insurance networks, the absence or underuse of safety nets, and other protocols,” another researcher lays far more blame at the hands of pharmaceuticals.

“Always request counseling by the pharmacist who fills the prescription,” he said.

O'Donnell also recommends that you fill all your prescriptions at a single pharmacy, and, if you have mail-order prescriptions, let each pharmacy know what you’re getting from other pharmacies.

“This provides the pharmacist with the information to conduct a drug interaction screen,” he said.

Finally, always tell the pharmacist and the doctor about any allergies you might have experienced, O'Donnell said. Give them the specifics of what your reactions were, such as itchiness, hives, or rashes.