And, frankly, blood isn't cheap, Spence said. That doesn't even include staff labor costs. Like the bloodless surgery center established at Tampa General Hospital in February, the private Alabama hospital uses various transfusion-free techniques. Patients can donate their own blood ahead of time or take special drugs that increase blood cell count prior to surgery. In another procedure, doctors take some of the patient's blood before surgery, replace it with a non-cellular fluid, then inject the patient's own blood after surgery.
Some doctors use techniques to make cuts cleanly and meticulously, which decreases bleeding.
Jehovah's Witnesses vary on their opinions of whether some of the methods are acceptable under church doctrine. Bloodless options are good for Witnesses, said Jeffrey Carson, chief of the division of general internal medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey. But he cautioned against a wholesale approach. The premise of these programs is that you don't have to get blood, and I think that's not true. We have been in a number of situations where I have observed a patient die when I think we could have saved the life. . . .