Word: bloodless
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...references to the sacredness of blood--had refused. Eventually, at the urging of members of her community, and in the face of a hospital threat of a court order to thwart her, Claudette Jackson had Henry transferred to nearby Englewood Hospital's New Jersey Institute for the Advancement of Bloodless Medicine and Surgery...
...understandable choice. The institute is the leader among more than 50 in the U.S. that now practice bloodless surgery. Without using any donor blood at all, they offer a wide range of surgical procedures that would ordinarily include transfusions, along with techniques that dramatically reduce, or virtually eliminate, blood loss...
...Steven Gould, a surgeon at the University of Illinois at Chicago who advocates reduced surgical use of donated blood: "Some operations require four to six units, and when you get to that level, it's hard to imagine not getting any blood. We will never have a completely bloodless society for surgical patients...
Still, even as the practice seemingly thumbs its nose at mainstream medicine's historic reliance on transfusion (more than 14 million units were used in the U.S. last year alone), an increasing number of physicians are taking a harder look at bloodless medicine. According to the Jehovah's Witnesses, more than 75,000 doctors already practice bloodless surgery in the U.S. Also, more and more patients are clamoring for safer and more effective options than transfusions, either because of religious conviction or fear of contracting disease...
Medical technology has tried to answer the call. It has come up with a panoply of methods and machinery, some of them known for decades but refined and repackaged to fit today's needs and concerns. While bloodless techniques vary from hospital to hospital, they invariably begin with medicinal and nutritional approaches to increase a patient's blood count before surgery. Efforts are made to guard against unnecessary blood loss from tests, and standard blood drawings are either reduced or eliminated altogether. And since an intensive-care patient during an average stay must part with close to a liter...