ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the need for a realistic approach to the implementation of social goals through policies and regulations. The hospitalized patient, who perceives the white-coated researcher to be a powerful figure, is likely to experience the consent form as a further instrument of power which can be rejected only at social costs and potential risks. Regulations become social institutions; they fight for continued existence rather than remaining subject to continuous scrutiny and critique. The universalistic bend of regulations depersonalizes and ritualizes this information giving process in such a way that even the literate, middle-class subject can be confused and alienated. Between the conceptual debate about the merits, ethics, and need for social regulation and the controversies about the technicalities of the specifics of various regulations, lays the important existential question of whether the social need, if identified, can indeed be accomplished through a nationally controlled regulation.
