Jehovah’s Witnesses who have heart surgery don’t seem to fare any worse than other patients, even though they refuse to undergo blood transfusions during the surgery, a new study has found.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that passages in the Bible bar them from accepting the blood of others, including blood donated to replace what they might lose in surgery.
Instead of blood, they take supplements to boost their blood production ahead of surgery and ask their doctors to use certain techniques and medications during surgery that can minimize blood loss.
To see how Jehovah’s Witness patients fared following heart surgery, a team from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio conducted a study of their long-term survival.
They compared 322 Jehovah’s Witness heart surgery patients with almost 49,000 non-Witnesses who had blood transfusions during heart surgery between 1983 to 2011.
Categories: Americas, Belief, CHRISTIANITY, Religion, United States
Jehovah’s Witnesses blood transfusion confusion
It is misleading to imply that there is NO RISK refusing blood transfusions which is how the Jehovah’s Witnesses Watchtower will spin it.
It’s only *elective surgery* for patients who are not in ER bleeding to death and in a modern hospital that has all the latest blood conservation gadgets.
How safe is all the thousands of pints of blood that Jehovah’s Witnesses do use?
Jehovahs Witnesses take blood products now in 2012.
They take all fractions of blood.This includes hemoglobin, albumin, clotting factors, cryosupernatant and cryo-poor too, and many, many, others.
If one adds up all the blood fractions the JWs takes, it equals a whole unit of blood. Any, many of these fractions are made from thousands upon thousands of units of donated blood.
Jehovah’s Witnesses can take Bovine *cows blood* as long as it is euphemistically called synthetic Hemopure.
Jehovah’s Witnesses now accept every fraction of blood except the membrane of the red blood cell. JWs now accept blood transfusions.
The fact that the JW blood issue is so unclear is downright dangerous in the emergency room.
More than 50,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses dead from Watchtowers deadly arbitrary blood ban. That is 50 times more than died at Jonestown massacre,some estimates run as high as 100,000 dead
—
Danny Haszard