VirusHead

> His (former Jehovah’s Witness) brother, Jonathan Lavoie,
> has launched an Internet petition calling on the federal
> government to make it illegal for a person to refuse
> treatment on religious grounds.

excuse me?

i agree with his father. i feel for his loss, but this is reactive insanity. so, because a few people make life-and-death decisions based on boogeyman-in-the-sky silliness, we should be forced to take government counsel in matters medical?

I actually agree with you on this. Still, there are a number of people who die each year for refusing blood transfusions. This is based on a singular interpretation of the prohibition on blood, one that isn’t followed even by orthodox Jews. The JWs don’t stick to kosher meat, but they allow their children to die.

As I said in the post, I don’t think that it would be a good precedent at all. But perhaps there could be some open debate in the public sphere to shine some light on this practice. It seems that the higher good principle would apply, as in the case where a pregnant woman who normally abstained from pork could eat pork if that’s all there was – because the life is more important than the rule. Of course, JWs eat pork…

They used to be against vaccines, too. That was dropped because of the huge public health concerns.

There’s a strange cherry-picking among the Watchtower leadership with regard to the prohibitions of the code of Moses. Some things matter, others don’t.

> The JWs don’t stick to kosher meat, but they allow their
> children to die.

which is precisely why children should be given full control over their own bodies. even if this ‘radical’ concept were adopted by society, im sure many JW kids would still die rather than upset their parents. as we both know full well, this is the problem with indoctrination of the very young, and IMHO, it is irresolvable.

to finish out my tirade on a more positive note (funny how easy it can be to neglect that) if he needs an outlet for the energy this trauma has generated, i would suggest trying to find community among fellow xjws. there isnt enough, we need to build if we wish to feel less alone…

REligion is never the ground for government…if someone wants to take their life because of what they believe, let them. The problem lies when someone wants to sacrifice someone ELSE’S life for what they believe. (i.e., see GW Bush and his new crusade in the Middle East).

to quote myself:

> which is precisely why children should be given full control
> over their own bodies.

and i might add, doctors should be given the full legal right to give private counsel to minors, as well. restriction never solves anything. freedom can be complicated, but as far as i’m concerned it always holds the answer.

I like the idea of medical counsel, Caleb.

As for JW community, there is some available – Meetup has many local groups of exJws, and there are forums and such. I’ve got a page of resources elsewhere on the blog, too. If he reads around a little, he’ll find a lot more now than there ever was before.

I haven’t been able to find a link, though. All I know is that he’s based in Canada. I was hoping to send a note along….

Jehovah’s Witness are Christian not Jewish and therefore do not stick to kosher meat. the directive against blood is given in the christian greek scriptures(acts 15:29). also a blood transfusion is not a guarantee of life. people die from receiving wrong blood type, infected blood, and simple bad reaction to the foreign blood. Every adult has the legal write to refuse treatment whatever the reason. also it is pretty harsh to say they let their children die,I doubt anyone would say if they got the transfusion and died from TRALI because of the blood. There are alternative treatments which actually may result in better care and I’m sure parents try very hard to make sure their children receive that.

JWs are more Jehovah-ists than Christians, and nothing is a guarantee of life. However, they quote the Hebrew Scriptures more than the Greek ones when they try to justify withholding blood. Their policies have even changed over time on this issue, although not as much as the vaccine policy.

What about the transcendent principle expressed by the idea above? A pregnant woman who normally abstained from pork could eat pork if that’s all there was – because the life is more important than the rule.

A jones one reasonable coment. GET ALL THE FACTS PEOPLE! WORLDWIDE THOUSANDS DIE BECOUSE OF MISUSE OF BLOOD! WHY,? HIV, HEPITITIS IN MANY FORMS, WOOPS WE GAVE YOU THE WRONG BLOOD CAUSES MANY DEATHS . AND MORE…..Do some resurch heres an interesting article on heart attack patiants and blood trans…..

‘’ For the holy spirit and we ourselves have favored adding no further burden to you, except these necessary things, 29 to keep abstaining from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication. If you carefully keep yourselves from these things, you will prosper. Good health to you! ‘’
says the Bible’s book of Acts , and it is for this reason that Jehovah’s Witnesses shun blood transfusions. They do not, however, shun surgery. As long as surgeons use special techniques, Jehovah’s Witnesses can have surgery – including operations with the greatest potential for blood loss, such as open-heart surgery – without ever receiving a drop of someone else’s blood.
Now some surgeons and anaesthetists are questioning whether every patient shouldn’t get the same treatment. Over the past decade a number of studies have found that, far from saving lives, blood transfusions can actually harm many patients.
The problem is not the much-publicised risk of blood-borne infectious agents, such as HIV, but the blood itself. Study after study has shown that transfusions, particularly those containing red blood cells, are linked to higher death rates in patients who have had a heart attack, undergone heart surgery, or who are in critical care. The exact nature of the link is uncertain, but it seems likely that chemical changes in ageing blood, their impact on the immune system, and the blood’s ability to deliver oxygen are key.
In fact, most experts now agree that the risk posed by the transfused blood itself is far greater than that of a blood-borne infection. “Probably 40 to 60 per cent of blood transfusions are not good for the patients,” says Bruce Spiess, a cardiac anaesthesiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
Such claims have led this week to the US National Institutes of Health issuing a call for proposals to study the problem. Also this week, the Joint Commission in Chicago, which accredits US hospitals, is holding the first of several meetings to look for ways to reduce the risks. It is expected to at least conclude that hospitals should be more selective in the use of transfusions.
Blood transfusion became a mainstay of medicine during the two world wars, where it was used as a last resort to save soldiers who had suffered massive blood loss. But now, far from being restricted to catastrophic bleeding, transfusions are routinely used as an optional treatment, most commonly for patients in intensive care or undergoing major surgery. In these situations, mostly small volumes of red cells are transfused, usually after they have been stored at 4 °C for anything up to 42 days.
The rationale behind such blood transfusions seems incontrovertible. Red cells deliver vital oxygen to tissues, and seriously ill patients who are also anaemic fare less well, so a transfusion should help. Those assumptions went untested for the better part of a century.
Things started to change in 1999 with a randomised controlled trial on 838 critical care patients in Canada that used haemoglobin levels to determine when a blood transfusion was given. Normal levels of haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in red cells, range from 120 to 170 grams per litre. A normal haematocrit – the proportion of red cells in the blood – ranges from 36 to 50 per cent. Doctors decide whether to give a transfusion based on a number of factors, including haemoglobin levels and haematocrit, and the patient’s overall robustness. Many guidelines exist, and practice varies from one hospital or doctor to another, but it is common for patients to receive transfusions when their haemoglobin dips to between 70 and 100 g/l or their haematocrit to 21 to 30 per cent.
But the Canadian study found significantly fewer patients died in hospital, 22 versus 28 per cent, if they received transfusions only when their haemoglobin fell below 70 g/l rather than when it fell below 100 g/l.
A more recent study has found that in heart attack patients with haematocrits of over 25 per cent, a transfusion is associated with more than three times the risk of death or a second heart attack within 30 days compared with not having a transfusion (Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 292, p 1555).
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 sixfold risk of dying within 30 days of surgery compared with not receiving one. Transfusions were also associated with more infections and higher incidences of stroke, heart attack and kidney failure – complications usually linked to a lack of oxygen in body tissues (Circulation, vol 116, p 2544).
For heart-surgery patients in the UK, a red cell transfusion was associated with three times the risk of dying within the year
“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,” says Gavin Murphy, a cardiac surgeon at the Bristol Heart Institute, who ran the uk study.
Organisations such as the American Society of Anaesthesiologists have started recommending that doctors be more conservative about ordering transfusions. But many experts worry that the recommendations are being ignored, and don’t go far enough. Transfusion, they say, should only be used as a last resort, and far greater effort should go into preventing blood loss in the first place and ensuring patients are not anaemic before surgery (see “Bloodless surgery”).
“Usually when there is any clinical uncertainty about a treatment you don’t give it, but with transfusions we do,” says James Isbister of the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, who is an adviser to the Australian Red Cross Blood Service.
A priority is to find out how transfusions can be harmful. One possibility is that they affect the patient’s immune system. Blood transfusions are typically teeming with cytokines – chemicals that modify immune cells – and both the cytokines and white blood cells in donated blood have been shown to affect the action of “recipient” immune cells in the lab. Before modern immunosuppressant drugs were developed, blood transfusions were sometimes used to achieve immunosuppression during kidney transplants.
Several of the recent studies have found an association between contracting infections in hospital and transfusions, which seems to support the theory. “The more units of blood patients receive, the more likely they are to get infections,” says Mary Rogers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who has studied transfusions in US heart surgery patients.
Infections are not the whole story, however. Within hours of being collected, red cells become stiff, making them less able to squeeze into narrow capillaries – essential if they are to deliver oxygen to organs. The changes are triggered in part by white cells, although it is not known how they might do this. Blood banks in the UK routinely filter blood to remove any white cells, something which is not done everywhere in the US or Australia.
Within hours of being collected, red cells become stiff, making them less able to squeeze into narrow capillaries
Chemical changes also take place that limit the ability of red cells to deliver oxygen to the tissues. For example, levels of nitric oxide (NO), which signals blood vessels to open, drop dramatically within a day of collection. “We are now working on the best way to put NO back into blood on a large scale,” says Jonathan Stamler of Duke University in North Carolina.
Another study, published last month, suggests the longer red cells are stored, the poorer their quality (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 358, p 1229). It found patients who received blood more than two weeks old were almost 70 per cent more likely to die within a year than those who got newer blood.
“If all blood had to be used within two weeks, it would cause a major inventory problem,” says Isbister, adding that the finding highlights the need to look for better ways to store blood. Just as important is the need for clinical trials to work out who benefits from transfusions and who doesn’t. “We need 60 or 70 randomised clinical trials right now,” says Spiess.

Bloodless surgery
“Reduce, reuse, recycle” is usually a mantra for the environment, but it applies to “bloodless surgery” too.
It was originally developed to enable Jehovah’s Witnesses, who shun transfusions, to undergo major surgery. But as safety concerns have spread so has its use. It may involve little more than treating any anaemia prior to surgery, reducing the blood taken for tests, and meticulous surgery.
“Most general surgery patients who receive a transfusion get one or two units of blood. With careful surgery you can avoid losing that amount in the first place,” says Nicolas Jabbour at the Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City.
Special techniques can also be used.For example, at the New Jersey Institute for the Advancement of Bloodless Medicine and Surgery at Englewood Hospital, patients who have lost a lot of blood may spend time in a hyperbaric chamber after surgery in an attempt to load their remaining red cells with oxygen. More commonly, during or after surgery, spilt blood is collected, cleaned and reinfused. The process has the disadvantage that it removes proteins that stimulate clotting and is also unacceptable to some Jehovah’s Witnesses. An alternative is to remove some blood before surgery and replace it with saline or another fluid. After surgery, the patient’s blood is returned.
Bloodless surgery works, suggests a 2006 study comparing 49 Jehovah’s Witnesses and 196 non-Jehovah’s Witnesses undergoing cardiac surgery,

Source, please?

Good article. Its interesting that when a person refuses blood and dies, the cause of death is due to refusing blood. How many doctors whose patient dies after getting a blood transfusion actually list cause of death as due to the transfusion. I would guess if statistics were kept on mortality rates on both sides the side taking blood transfusions would have a very high mortality rate.
What gets my goat is the number of people that knock JW’s dont bother to do any research.
Just type in blood transfusion deaths into google and look at the sources, its an eyeopener. This is one of many. Another question I have to ask all you who knock the JW’s is why have there been a thousandfold increase in the number of hospitals and surgeons who do bloodless surgury? Is it because of the tiny group of JW’s inflicting their will on the world of medicine or is it maybe because the medical profession is realizing the dangers associated with blood.
In the early years before medical research advanced to where it is now, blood was regarded as a magic pill. Now it comes down to the old school line of thought. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks mentality. What was the mentality 25 years ago toward those refusing blood transfusions and how has it changed?

BTW virushead, I noted you asked the person who posted the article for the source. I counted at least 10 sources quoted in the article itself as to where it got the information. These are the sources you want to confirm and not the writer of the article or where the article appeared. I have the impression that if the article appeared in a source you find not credible you would dimiss the entire article without checking any furthur.

Dave – I’ve said many times elsewhere on this blog that I applaud the medical advances in bloodless surgery. The trouble is that there are circumstances where it doesn’t apply, such as when there is sudden massive blood loss or in circumstances where blood replacement is part of a larger treatment strategy. The JW position has changed many times over the years, while still always claiming direction from the unchanging law of God. Of course, there are counterarguments, even from biblical sources. Their odd interpretations wouldn’t matter much to anyone, including me, if there wasn’t also a significant body trail of their victims.

I don’t knock JWs, I argue against the unethical behaviors of the leadership.

I’ve asked for a source to call attention to the fact that this respondent doesn’t actually do research at all, like most other JWs. There’s a reason for that, of course – when independent reasoning is against your religion, you don’t get the best training. I think it’s funny that what *counts* for research to JWs is basically whatever the Watchtower Society publishes. As with their arguments on almost any topic, it’s cherry-picked and massaged to an almost ridiculous degree. However, my judgment on these matters is of little importance.

I stand in solidarity with those who have seen through the control mechanisms, and who have lost people they love. I post items like this to show them that there are folks out here who understand. That is all the more important for those who are misunderstood by the wider culture and shunned from within the organization. My aim is to offer support and understanding so that, among other things, the isolation tactics are less effective.

So it doesn’t really affect me very much if you have mistaken impressions about my research methods or anything else. It just doesn’t score, because it reads like a defense mechanism to me. I understand, but it’s symptomatic of a wider inability to think ethically, with intellectual rigor, and with loving compassion.

the Law of blood ISa Law from Jehovah not from the leaders it say the same in every bible that hasnt been re-written for the 20th Century or politically correct words
Acts 15:19, 20, 29
For the holy spirit and we ourselves have favored adding no further burden to YOU, except these necessary things, 29 to keep abstaining from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication. If YOU carefully keep yourselves from these things, YOU will prosper. Good health to YOU!”

whether you a JW or not would you like contanimated blood – its in you best interest to live and love life but to what cost JW’s dont want to die but if they do they have the faithful truth that Jehovah will resurrect them in the coming New System on earth paridise – what hope you you have in this wicked world JW hope isfrom the Bible that why they follow the bible because its a rule book for your health and safety

They used to be against vaccines, too. That was dropped because of the huge public health concerns.

where is you proof on this you say but u dont research or give evidence

On the JW vaccination history, here’s a good source:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/witness6.htm

Keep abstaining from blood – but you don’t eat meat kosher in the Jewish way (drained as much as possible of its blood according to the Law).

Why might that be?

[...] Mormons don’t allow coffee, the Jehovah Witnesses don’t allow blood transfusions, the Amish wear no buttons (ornaments) and only use horse drawn [...]

The Supreme Court of Canada will be making a ruling on a child’s right to decide medication treatment. This stemmed from the case where the court imposed a blood transfusion on a 14 year old girl in Winnipeg despite her own objection.

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=53db5bab-eb3e -41da-b7bc-a566c215945f

In any case, it is obvious that the JW’s doctrine on blood transfusion is changed over the years, similar to their view on vaccination. I think the real problem is that these doctrines are based on human decisions, which are, as proven over history, fallible. How can people accept the fact that the decisive criteria for their eternal damnation are drawn up by a periodical called the Watchtower, and these criteria can change over time? It’s a fact that blood fraction products are now okay for JWs since 2000 (?). But what if someone took these products before the publication of that Watchtower, are these people damned or excommunicated (by the way, they should not mean the same thing in my opinion)? No single human being can determine another person’s eternal destiny.

There’s always a problem with literal interpretation of the Bible without looking at the historic and cultural context. Misquoting and taking passages out of context from the Bible have led to many dangerous cults over the years. I am not calling JW a cult, as I know a few very good people who are devout JW. I just think people should be more critical with doctrines drawn up by “elders” in their religion, even if the elders sincerely believe that they are based on their best interpretation of the bible. They are only human and they CAN fail….look how many disgraced religious leaders are out there.