Medicine Without Blood

In The New Yorker, Amanda Schaffer writes on the ways in which surgical practices have developed and benefited from “bloodless-medicine programs” designed to accommodate Jehovah’s Witnesses who consider receiving transfusions sinful. In her three-part series, Schaffer reports that restrictive transfusion practices may actually benefit patients more than liberal transfusion. “In recent years, the American Medical Association has listed transfusion as among the most overused therapies in medicine,” she writes.

Read at The New Yorker

© 2011 Religion & Politics