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PHILADELPHIA (AP)—When Irv Shapiro found out he needed surgery to fix a ruptured heart valve, one of the first questions he asked his doctor was whether he should donate his own blood.

He hoped to avoid being transfused with someone else's blood, but wasn't thrilled with the idea of spending weeks before surgery having pints of his own blood drawn and put in storage. So when he found out that Pennsylvania Hospital offered a third option—once only available to Jehovah's Witnesses—it was a relief.

"Not needing a blood transfusion, not having to get blood taken out of me, and a fast recovery time—I was OK with all of that,'' said Shapiro, 60, a founding partner of an architectural firm and heavy traveler.

Pennsylvania Hospital is now able to offer so-called "bloodless surgery'' to 90 percent of its patients who want it, joining a small but growing number of bloodless medicine programs around the country that also serve the general public. Advocates put the number at about 120.

Many states have bloodless surgery centers or hospitals that perform no-transfusion surgery for Jehovah's Witnesses, who believe the Bible forbids transfusions, but not for the general public.

Some hospitals are now providing no-transfusion surgery to more patients because of advances in equipment and changes in protocols.

Bloodless surgery techniques vary depending on the type of operation, but can include efficient heart-lung bypass machines that circulate a patient's blood during surgery; using high-tech scalpels that clot the blood as they cut tissue; or freezing tissue before it's excised.

There is also pre-surgery planning. Doctors start seeing patients weeks before surgery to prepare.

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HalfMooner:
But I gotta give 'em some credit for, in effect, acting as experimental subjects for the improvement of surgical techniques.

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