Blood Transfusions—a Biological “Sin”
Dr. Charles P. Bailey is one of America’s leading open-heart surgeons and is connected with the St. Barnabas Hospital in New York city. He was awarded a gold medal by the American Medical Association in the summer of 1971 for his rebuilding a heart valve with tissue from the thigh of the patient.
In an interview with a member of the Awake! staff, Dr. Bailey made the following interesting observations:
“Blood is a liquid organ. When it is blood from another person, its administration involves the many problems of biological rejection, which have in the long run defeated the transplanting of the heart and other organs.
“Since the blood cells are normally destroyed in sixty days and the liquid content ‘turnover’ is even more rapid, a blood transfusion is a temporary or a transient transplant of a liquid organ. Indeed, this is undoubtedly the reason for its general acceptance at a time when organ transplantation is considered experimental.
“However, we must still consider that administration of a blood transfusion is to some degree a biological ‘sin.’ In common practice the risk of hepatitis following a single blood transfusion is greater than 5 percent, which figure is establishable. With multiple transfusions it is correspondingly greater. Damages of incompatibility and kidney damage from transfusions, though much reduced, can never be abolished, no matter how carefully the blood is ‘matched.’ There are other risks, including the transmission of diseases such as syphilis, malaria and certain blood parasites, which are not entirely preventable by our current methods of screening.
“For these reasons and others related to our specific problems, we at St. Barnabas use as little blood replacement as possible in performing open- and closed-heart surgery. By the use of an extremely careful hemostatic technique and the use of plasmic expanders it is nearly always possible to ‘carry’ a cooperative patient through these procedures without resorting to blood.”
Incidentally, Dr. Bailey has found that Jehovah’s witnesses as patients respond well to these surgical therapeutic measures.