Quality Alternatives to Transfusion - HOW CAN DOCTORS HELP?

Skilled Physicians can help one who has lost blood and so has fewer red cells.  Once volume is restored, doctors can administer oxygen at high concentration.  this makes more of it available for the body and has often had remarkable results.  British doctors used this with a woman who had lost so much blood that  "her haemoglobin fell to 1.8 g/ditre.  She was successfully treated . . . [with] high inspired oxygen concentrations and transfusions of gelatin solution [haemaccel]."  (Anaesthesia, January 1987)  The report also says that others with acute blood loss have been successfully treated in hyperbaric oxygen chambers.  

Physicians can also help their patients to form more red cells. How?  By giving them iron-containing preparations (into muscles or veins), which can aid the body in making red cells three to four times faster than normal.  Recently another help has become available.  Your kidneys produce a  harmone called erythropoietin (EPO), which stimulates bone marrow to form red cells.  Now synthetic  (recombinant) EPO is available.  Doctors may give this to some anemic patients, thus helping them to form replacement red cells very quickly. 

Even during surgery, skilled can conscientious  surgeons and anesthesiologists can help by employing  advanced blood-conservation methods.  Meticulous operative technique, such as an electrocautery to minimize bleeding, cannot be overstressed.  Sometimes blood flowing into a wound can be aspirated, filtered, and directed back into circulation. 

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