Report from Canadian Press

May 25, 2007

VANCOUVER -- One of the leading practitioners of "bloodless surgery" says that when Jehovah's Witnesses demand to be treated without transfusions - as parents of premature babies in Quebec City and Vancouver have done recently - they are not relying on junk science.

Rather, they are pushing the medical establishment to provide them with a form of treatment that is increasingly available, but still relatively obscure, in the United States and Canada, says Aryeh Shander, chief of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in New Jersey.

Dr. Shander, interviewed yesterday in the wake of a Quebec court decision that ordered transfusions for premature twins despite objections from their Jehovah's Witnesses parents, said that even tiny babies can be treated safely with techniques commonly called bloodless surgery, or more correctly, blood conservation.

"Bloodless is sort of a misnomer because essentially what we do is we treat patients without the use of banked blood products," said Dr. Shander, who is also a professor at Mount Sinai school of medicine in New York. Read full article.

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