I was looking at a chest radiograph of my patient whose right lung was drowned in a bag of fluid. He had been taking a new blood thinner and had difficulty with breathing for two weeks. The figure of oxygen saturation was swaying up and down like a sail on a ship, as if it might capsize any time in the rough sea. Rising panic.

I washed my hands and put on my gloves. The idea is to put in a catheter and drain out the fluid, before my patient was "drowned." His daughter was standing next to me, and I promised her I'll do my best.

I didn't use a check-in-the-box list that forewarns my patient and his daughter every possible complications. All the worries with wait-and-see (when the right lung was squished and left one squashed). All those concerns with blood thinner (Oh sorry, but there isn't antidote). All the structures that I could bump into accidentally, from artery to nerve to lung to liver.

I managed that patient not long after hearing the story of Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board, a British court case in which a Scottish mother was awarded £5.25 million compensation in claiming her doctor who "failed" to alert a risk of traditional birth. The diabetic mother had a small build and her larger-than-average baby's shoulder was stuck at the birth canal.

One of the key implications is that patients should have been told every single risk and information. Otherwise, a doctor can be found guilty in not providing an informed consent.

Clearly, I failed in my case.

I admit that it's not easy to set a standard in the way we disclose the risk of every single medical procedure. There is always a complicating factor: our patient. To answer this question, Lisa Rosenbaum does a fantastic job of admiring paternalism in this week's New England Journal of Medicine .

To paraphrase Lisa Rosenbaum, "The spirit of informed decision making reflects the recognition that only patients are experts on their own values. But our approach assumes a value framework not all patients possess. What if the patient's preference is to know less?"