The Waste Land.

Most people agree that, in order for consent forms to be easily understood by patients at large, they should exclude any lingo too complicated for an eighth grader to understand. So how does radiation oncology hold up? Because let’s be honest, if you’ve ever had the pleasure of undertaking a peer-to-peer to gain approval of a radiation technique, you know that even other MDs can have trouble grasping the general gist. This cross sectional study queried 89 US academic rad onc departments, with two-thirds providing consent forms for analysis. Sadly, only 9 of 113 forms (8%) were at or below an eighth grade level. The most conservative (i.e., lowest) estimates of grade levels for most forms ranged from 11 to 14, with a good chunk of difficult words categorized at a grade level of 16(!). TBL: Rad onc consent forms need SparkNotes. | Perni, JAMA Oncol 2019