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Blood Transfusions: Why did a Famed surgeon speaks in favour of avoiding blood transfusions, he isn't a JW's?

• (Acts 15:29) . . .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!” LEEDS, ENGLAND—“If you ever operate on a doctor, they will not be hammering on your door wanting a blood transfusion, that is for sure. They go to great lengths to avoid one, and I would,” said Mr. Stephen Pollard, a leading transplant surgeon in Britain. “Apart from a financial savings, patients are much happier without it. Patients get better more quickly if they don't require a blood transfusion.” Mr. Pollard’s remarks followed a unique bloodless kidney transplant at St. James Hospital in Leeds on March 10, 2000. Mr. Alf Hoyle, one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, was given new life by his wife in an operation in which her kidney was transplanted to him. “Three things have come together to make this unique,” said a hospital spokesman quoted in The Herald of Glasgow, Scotland. “It was a bloodless operation, it was a non-related donor between husband and wife, and the couple are Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Although Hoyle’s case was unusual, it is an example of a growing trend in medical care—the use of medical and surgical techniques that avoid donor blood. Around 100 similar procedures have been carried out at the St. James Hospital. These pioneering operations done in Leeds and elsewhere are pushing surgical science forward for the benefit of all. A sign of the international interest in non-blood medicine is the First European Congress on Bloodless Health Care to be held in Geneva on May 11-12, 2000. About 1,000 physicians are expected to attend the congress, where they will learn how to accommodate a growing number of requests for bloodless treatment. “Avoidance of *allogeneic transfusion is becoming the new gold standard of care,” according to an announcement published by the congress’ Scientific Committee. “With transfusion practice still varying widely in Europe, both nationally and internationally, clinicians need easy access to a broad overview of blood conservation methods and alternatives to allogeneic blood transfusion to offer this kind of quality care.” Jehovah’s Witnesses accept medical treatment for themselves and their children, but refuse blood transfusions because Christians are commanded to ‘abstain from blood.’ (Acts 15:20) The Bible does not comment on organ transplants; this is a matter of patient choice. * Allogeneic stem cell transplantation is a procedure in which a person receives blood-forming stem cells(cells from which all blood cells develop) from a genetically similar, but not identical, donor. This is often a sister or brother, but could be an unrelated donor. Stem cells can be harvested from a newborn's umbilical cord. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allogeneic_stem_cell_transplantation (Genesis 9:4) Only flesh with its soul—its blood—you must not eat. (Leviticus 3:17) “‘It is a statute to time indefinite for your generations, in all your dwelling places: you must not eat any fat or any blood at all.’” (Leviticus 7:26) “‘And you must not eat any blood in any places where you dwell, whether that of fowl or that of beast. (Leviticus 17:10) “‘As for any man of the house of Israel or some alien resident who is residing as an alien in your midst who eats any sort of blood, I shall certainly set my face against the soul that is eating the blood, and I shall indeed cut him off from among his people. (Deuteronomy 12:16) Only the blood you must not eat. On the earth you should pour it out as water. (Deuteronomy 12:23) Simply be firmly resolved not to eat the blood, because the blood is the soul and you must not eat the soul with the flesh. (1 Samuel 14:32) And the people began darting greedily at the spoil and taking sheep and cattle and calves and slaughtering them on the earth, and the people fell to eating along with the blood.

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  Thank you for the information - if only people were better informed as to their medical choices...