Heart Surgery Without Blood Transfusion
THE Roosevelt Report of January, 1963, published by the Roosevelt Hospital, 428 West 59th Street, New York city, carried an article “Hearts and Sugar Water—A Story of Surgical Success.” It said in part: “Roosevelt Hospital surgeons, in November, opened a man’s heart and successfully repaired its defective valve without using a drop of blood transfusion, either during surgery or postoperatively. In most institutions where open-heart surgery is performed, such an operation requires from 15 to 20 pints of bank blood.
“Key to this unusual surgical accomplishment here is the use at the Hospital of the Kimray Open-Heart Machine, a new type of heart-lung apparatus which allows the substitution of a small quantity of five per cent dextrose in water for the six to ten pints of bank blood used to fill or ‘prime’ the older type of heart-lung machine. . . . The great importance of the use of the Kimray Machine to the individual patient is the avoidance of dangerous blood transfusion reactions, so likely to occur when multiple blood transfusions are used. Serious kidney complications, virus hepatitis, and disturbances of blood clotting are foremost among the hazards that have been eliminated.”
Roosevelt Hospital surgeons are not the only ones who see the need to use blood substitutes for priming open-heart machines. Reported the Long Island Sunday Press of February 24, 1963: “A blood substitute—dextran—has been used successfully to prime the pump in more than 200 open-heart operations by University of Minnesota doctors. They feel that dextran also reduces the risk of transfusion reactions.”
Highlighting the wisdom of these heart surgeons in avoiding the use of blood is an article in Life magazine (February 15, 1963) entitled “Lurking Risks of Transfusion,” which said that there are powerful reasons for being afraid of blood transfusions—various diseases that may be lurking in human blood, such as syphilis, malaria, and serum hepatitis. What is the mortality rate for persons who get serum hepatitis and who are forty years or older? The article reported that one ten-year study showed it was 23 percent. It stated further:
“Dr. Jere W. Lord, Jr., who performs vascular surgery at University and Columbus hospitals in New York . . . recently observed that despite the advances in knowledge in the last 20 years, the physician’s problems in using blood are still of major proportions: ‘There are men in the field so aware of the problem that they’ve learned how to prime the pump-oxygenator for open-heart surgery with straight glucose. . . . I try to do all the surgery I can without blood.’”
Yes, use of blood is dangerous, not only because of medical complications, but because it is forbidden by God’s Word. (Acts 15:28, 29) Conscientious doctors are finding that there is much that can be done, however, even in difficult cases, without transfusing blood.