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A harmonic scalpel in hand, Dr.Aryeh Shander stands amid machines used in bloodless procedures at Englewood Hospital |
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| FEAR OF AIDS IS ONLY ONE REASON SOME DOCTORS ARE
CALLING FOR
BY JOHN LANGONE WITH REPORTING BY DAN CRAY/LOS ANGELES 
y every standard medical and logical, Henry Jackson, lying
unconscious in a New Jersey hospital on his 32nd birthday, was
finished. Massive internal hemorrhaging had drained him of 90%
of his blood. His level of hemoglobin--the vital,
oxygen-carrying compound in his red cells--had plummeted from a
normal reading of 13 to an ominous 1.7, a number that one of his
doctors characterized as "incompatible with survival." A blood
transfusion could save him, but his wife, torn between her
husband's life and their beliefs as Jehovah's Witnesses--a
religious community that prohibits transfusions because of
biblical 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.
It was an 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. When Jackson was wheeled into the institute, Dr. Aryeh Shander, chief of anesthesiology and critical-care medicine, and his team moved swiftly. First, they essentially paralyzed the patient with drugs to reduce the demand for oxygen by his muscles, brain, lungs and other organs. Next, they gave him high-potency formulations of iron supplements and vitamins, plus "industrial doses" of a blood-building drug, synthetic erythropoietin, that stimulates the bone marrow to produce red blood cells. Finally, intravenous fluids were administered to goad what little circulation he had left.
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