Abusing that hope means that doctors lose a patient's trust. And once you lose that trust, it's hard to get it back. The medical community, says Moreno, still hasn't regained the trust from African-Americans that it lost when the Tuskegee experiments were revealed. Unwavering adherence to the principles of informed consent will help insure that kind of thing doesn't happen again. The policy of informed consent says patients have a right to know what's going on if they volunteer for medical research.
Hope is really important.
It's a big motivator. That's fine if people know the odds are against them. But once you lose that trust, it's hard to get it back. Human Radiation Experiments America's most well-known examples of informed consent nightmares are the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and radiation experiments in the 1940s and '50s. ABC News Internet Ventures.