Partnership and consent in MS treatment choice

It is not only good medical practice to ensure patients are fully involved in their treatment decisions, but it also improves subsequent compliance, and may even be cost effective. However, choosing treatments in MS is becoming increasingly complex, which means that ensuring patients understand all the issues is a challenge and time consuming. Preference sensitive care (which applies to current MS immunomodulatory treatments) is particularly vulnerable to the individual doctor's opinion and there is an onus on the physician to ensure the decision made incorporates the patient's individual values. National patient decision making tools are an appropriate solution to this dilemma and may, in the future, be a legal requirement in consent to treatment.