"As stated, informed consent is both a legal obligation and an ethical principle. The requirement that medical providers obtain permission from their patients prior to providing treatment is embedded in the idea that individuals should be empowered to make autonomous decisions regarding their own care. Accordingly, informed consent is a process through which accurate and relevant information is presented to a patient so that he or she is able to knowledgeably accept or forego medical care, based on an appreciation and understanding of the facts presented. In general, the literature documenting the process of obtaining informed consent indicates that it involves three broad principles: disclosure, capacity and voluntariness. Disclosure requires the physician to provide accurate and adequate information on the benefits, risks, costs and alternatives of treatment; in this context, adequacy is often understood as the amount of information that the average patient would require to be an informed participant in the decision. Capacity refers to the patient's ability to understand and rationally process the information presented to him or her and to make health care choices based on this understanding. And voluntariness describes the patient's ability to make a decision free from coercion or any type of unfair incentives. According to attorney J. Steven Svoboda and colleagues, writing for the Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy, this requires the physician to "distance himself as much as possible from his personal preferences and values and to present interests at stake for the patient.""