Jock Davis smiled and sat up on his bed at Pennsylvania Hospital [...], looking more like a guy on vacation than on high-dose chemotherapy for a blood cancer called multiple myeloma.
He had come all the way from Rochester, N.Y., for a stem cell transplant because Patricia Ford, the doctor directing his care, was willing to withhold a standard part of the multi-week treatment: a blood transfusion.
As a Jehovah's Witness, Davis, 48, has religious objections to receiving blood, including his own. Ford, director of the hospital's Center for Bloodless Medicine and Surgery, performed the world's first no-transfusion stem cell transplant more than 15 years ago.
While most centers still consider it too risky to attempt, Ford keeps making history. Davis was her 100th "bloodless" transplant patient, an unprecedented milestone.
"People think I'm doing something mystical or magical," said Ford, a blood and cancer specialist. "It's not."
And bloodless therapy is not just for Jehovah's Witnesses.
Although Ford's strategies - many surprisingly low-tech and commonsense - were developed to enable Witnesses to undergo major elective surgeries, they have become standard throughout Pennsylvania Hospital. The bloody truth is that avoiding transfusions reduces complications, costs, and recovery time for patients in general.
"It's amazing," said Ford, "how much blood is collected and wasted and given unnecessarily in this country."
The primary components of blood seem a bit magical, even if Ford's methods aren't. If red blood cells stop ferrying oxygen throughout the body, vital organs die within minutes. White blood cells are the immune system's army, fighting invaders. Platelets regulate clotting, instantly sensing when blood is leaking. These cells all float in the watery plasma.
The blood also contains more than a thousand minor components, including the stem cells that give rise to all of it.
Jehovah's Witnesses - with more than a million members in the United States - reject transfusions because they broadly interpret a Bible passage that bans the "eating" of blood. However, as science has revealed the fluid's complexity, that interpretation has evolved to apply only to the four primary blood components, not to stem cells.
"I don't need a doctor who shares my beliefs," Davis said. "I just need one who respects them."
In the 1990s, Ford developed a reputation among Witnesses for doing exactly that.
To read the full story, visit Philly.com.
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