A consequence of the Witnesses’ long-time no-blood stance, dating back to the 1940s, was the gradual emergence of a new field called “bloodless medicine.” Here and there, courageous doctors had taken up the challenge of treating them in accord with their religious beliefs. A New Scientist Magazine article of April 26, 2008, states that bloodless surgery “was originally developed to enable Jehovah’s Witnesses, who shun transfusions, to undergo major surgery.” The article even opens with the Leviticus 18 scripture underlying the Witnesses prime rationale: “‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood. No soul of you shall eat blood.”
Since then, I have several times made the assertion that the number of lives saved through such medicine, now adopted by the greater world, must surely outnumber those lost by a few members of a relatively tiny religious group that stuck to its principles despite much opposition. Can this assertion be proven?
That New Scientist article quotes Dr. Gavin Murphy, a cardiac surgeon at the Bristol Heart Institute in the UK: “There is virtually no high-quality study in surgery, or intensive or acute care, outside of when you are bleeding to death, that shows that blood transfusion is beneficial, and many that show it is bad for you.” One study citied in the article is from the journal Circulation, vol 116, p 2544. The New Scientist article stated:
“For almost 9000 patients who had heart surgery in the UK between 1996 and 2003, receiving a red cell transfusion was associated with three times the risk of dying in the following year and an almost six fold risk of dying within 30 days of surgery compared with not receiving one.”
There were 8598 patients in that study. 57% of them were transfused, for a total of 4,909. 43% were not transfused, for a total of 3,689. 212 of the transfused group died in-hospital. 9 of the non-transfused group died in hospital.
One might easily charge that only the sickest patients would receive a transfusion in the first place—for example, those with the lowest hematocrit. This would make the entire study a worthless comparison of apples to oranges. But the authors of the study recognized that, and specifically made adjustments to take those risk factors into account. Even so, the results were dramatic.
With AI kicking and screaming all the way (since it generally seeks to validate the majority opinion) I asked it to extrapolate those figures worldwide. There’s too many variables, it said, healthcare and transfusion practices differ widely, it said. You don’t know, for any given person, what would have happened were the opposite treatment applied, it said. Yes, yes, I know, I replied—do it anyway.
It said: “Bottom line: If the Bristol absolute rates and the extreme concentration of early deaths among transfused patients had applied uniformly worldwide, one would expect on the order of 200,000–300,000 in-hospital deaths after cardiac surgery in 1996–2003, with the great majority occurring in patients who received red-cell transfusions.“
The “great majority” of 200-000-300,000 deaths worldwide—duplicating the 212/9 ratio of the British study! And you at least have to times it by five (if not more) to reflect 35 years of bloodless medicine, not just the 7 years of the study. That brings the total to 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 in-hospital deaths of that same 212/9 ratio!
However, the study went beyond in-hospital and tracked outcomes up to a year later.. Summarized AI: “The quoted finding (from the 2006 Circulation study of nearly 9,000 UK heart-surgery patients, as reported in the New Scientist article) shows a strong association between receiving a red-cell transfusion and markedly higher mortality: roughly 3× higher risk of death in the following year and nearly 6× higher risk within 30 days, compared with patients who did not receive one.”
Incorporating this expanded timeframe doubles the worldwide death figures once again to 2,000,000 – 3,000,000!
Witness deaths since 1945 from refusing blood transfusion have been estimated at 30,000. Thus, even allowing for an enormous margin of error, the assertion is easily corroborated that “the number of lives saved through such medicine, now adopted by the greater world, must surely outnumber those lost by a few members of a relatively tiny religious group that stuck to its principles despite much opposition.”
….
The “kicking and screaming” of AI, mentioned earlier, was mostly insistence that, since so many variables were involved, extrapolations were not to be taken literally but were only for purposed of scale. Very well. That is all I have used them for. They may BE literal. But even if taken just to indicate scale, the results are so overwhelming as to accommodate an enormous margin of error.
I would have thought that just common sense would have enabled the conclusion—that when you expand a beneficial new therapy developed for a small group to a population 1,000 times greater, of course the lives saved in the greater with outnumber those lost in the smaller! But this is not a world that runs on common sense, so it is necessary to run the figures. Even I am surprised by how huge they are. It means that those mocking memes awarding Jehovah’s Witnesses a Nobel Prize for spurring bloodless surgery are no joke! They actually should get such a prize! (or at least an honorable mention. The innovating doctors themselves would get the prize. But surely, it should be noted somewhere who put them on the right track to begin with.)
These results present an entirely new way of looking at deaths resulting over the decades from the Jehovah’s Witness policy of refusing blood transfusions. In the event that someone refuses to acknowledge that dying in accord with one’s religious conscience represents a regrettable but nonetheless noble sacrifice, one can always shift focus to dying for the advance of medical science. Dying so that SCIENCE may be advanced—why, there is nothing in today’s world more heroic than that! It even eclipses dying for one’s country, universally spun as heroic even after one tallies up the staggering death count.
It means that the greater world is massively indebted to Jehovah’s Witnesses for safer medicine.
****** The bookstore
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