What is the standard of care provided to a patient by a doctor?

Patients are not medical experts, so to choose appropriately they need information, provided by a health professional, to assist in deciding if and how they will be treated. Yamauchi J. in Dickson v. Pinder, 2010 ABQB 269 at para. 68, 489 A.R. 54 identified five kinds of information that a patient should receive: 1. the medical practitioner’s diagnosis of the patient’s condition; 2. the prognosis of that condition with and without medical treatment; 3. the nature of the proposed medical treatment; 4. the risks associated with the proposed medical treatment; and 5. the alternatives to the proposed medical treatment, and the advantages and risks of those alternatives.