I've already covered in this thread a situation where bloodless alternatives do not adequately provide enough of a solution. From what I've read, no-blood alternatives have one major flaw working against them. Time.

If you have time, no-blood solutions are definitely the way to go. Drugs/supplements, self-donation, diet, etc are all excellent treatments.

But when you have no time to build up a reserve of blood to transfuse yourself with, when your condition is deteriorating so rapidly that encouraging the body to produce more blood won't work fast enough (or perhaps your body is currently unable to produce enough of it's own blood), what then?

And please stop using that blood letting analogy. Blood letting was based on the flawed assumtion that they could just bleed out the disease. Perhaps if you were comparing to the old blood-transfusion assumption that blood was blood, before Rh(D) factors, blood-types, and blood-born diseases were known about, you'd have a valid comparison. Nowadays they know a lot more about how blood interacts with blood, they know about proteins, prions, genotypes/phenotypes, and how they all affect the interaction. (Citing a risk of blood-born illness is easily comparable to the risk of catching any number of transmissible diseases while at the hospital...)

Without such knowledge, no-blood solutions would never have been developed. But as I said, until they come up with a synthetic blood that replicates *all* the features of real blood (and not just most of them), there will still be situations (as I said above, mostly when time is of the essence) in which a transfusion does more good than a no-blood alternative.