Poor Informed Consent Process

Our 1 year old son needed to have some diagnostic tests to determine the cause of his non-typical asthma symptoms. These included an endoscopy to look at his upper airway for obstructions, and imaging of his brain and chest. The imaging was to be done while he was still under anesthesia and originally the physician requested a CT scan. At this point our son had several CT scans already and we were concerned about another one. Upon doing research we realized that an MRI is another option with much less radiation exposure. We brought this to the attention our sons physician and he told us that he originally chose CT scan over MRI because it's faster and will require our son to be under anesthesia, which has risks of its own, for less time. We were upset because the physician did not give us the option to choose what we felt was best for our son (being under anesthesia for longer with less radiation, or, more radiation exposure but less time spent under anesthesia) and instead made the choice for us with his original CT scan order. If it wasn't for our own gut feeling and time spent doing research, we would not have been active and informed participants in our son's care.
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