The state's main goal is to preserve human life, regardless the opinion. In the case of Jehovah’s Witness cases, the state would take steps to override their religious belief, to better the chance of life. His statement is that whether a state can order a person to receive medical treatment when the family does not wish it, when it overrides evidence about the wishes of the patient, and the state has no justification besides their general interest in life. He also concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the liberty of individuals, whether conscious or unconscious, from such invasion of the state.…
What if your mother suddenly has a terrible heart attack and now needs open heart surgery. Picture your son or daughter getting into car wreck and needs an emergency blood transfusion. Imagine a sibling having leukemia, and needs regular blood transfusions to survive. Not exactly what you want to think about on a Sunday afternoon, but these are the harsh realities of the world we live in. Many of you may have experience with these tragedies, and lost. If your thinking “I wish I knew of a way to help” well there is a way. With the simple donation of blood, platelets or plasma, you could save the life of a loved one or a complete stranger.…
Through a review of blood utilization in the surgical units, the administrative manager of clinical operations for a large hospital noted what she believed to be a significant variation in the number of transfusion orders being placed per surgical case among the surgeons on staff. She brought the question to the surgical quality improvement committee, and the committee initiated a review of current standard practice for ordering transfusions within the surgical units of the hospital and also a review of best practices as supported by current research evidence. They discovered that the evidence from transfusion research revealed that transfusion therapy can result in a variety of adverse patient outcomes, including the transmission of infection diseases and allergic reactions. As a result, the hospital medical staff moved to adopt as its general “best practice” for transfusion ordering: a minimum hemoglobin concentration of 7g/dL (21% hematocrit) as an indication for red cell transfusions and a 10g/dL hemoglobin concentration (30% hematocrit) as a level at which transfusion therapy usually is unnecessary.…
believe that if doctors have a patient whose life they can save and they have a donor who's…
Julian Savulescu and Richard W. Momeyer, wrote an article expressing their theories on informed consent being based on rational beliefs. The article constructed around Jehovah Witness beliefs causing its followers to reject blood transfusions, and how it is theoretically irrational. Both pressed the reason for irrational behavior due to the fear of violating biblical principles according to their interpretation of the scripture. Thus leading to Savulescu and Momeyer’s concussion, Jehovah Witnesses are not fully autonomous in their decision making, due to their belief system rooted in religion, rather than medical science. This suggests when patients act on their autonomy while regarding medical care, it must derive from rational beliefs as defined by commonly accepted medical practice, or it will be considered false…
Refusal of blood transfusions became common practice only after a 1945 church decision (Mann, Votto, & Kambe, 1992). Indeed, Jehovah’s Witnesses interpret these sections of the Bible differently and if a member accepts blood into their veins, they are shunned and forfeit their membership in the faith community and eternal life. The society had enforced shunning and social isolation by Witnesses’ own family members, relatives, and friends, ultimately leading to expulsion from the religion (Doyle,…
Narratives in North America, 1880-1910 and Griffith’s both present interesting insight into health practice, and the beliefs that surround it at the turn of the 20th century. While Opp’s essay is a look at Protestant faith healing, Griffith is looking at fasting and masculinity. For two seemingly different topics taking place in the same era, there are a surprising number of connections and parallels. Though looking at slightly different aspects of health and belief in the late Victorian era, the relationship between the two is evident in both of them. This is seen through the firsthand testimonies of believers in faith healing in Opp’s essay, and through the…
During this time, James didn’t know of the blood groups. He had no idea there were different blood types. It wasn’t until 1901 when the first blood types were discovered by Karl Landsteiner. Once the blood types were discovered, this made blood transfusions way safer and more successful. Today, blood transfusions are very common and very useful. There are a great number of people who donate blood.…
During the first world war, blood transfusions were developed to help save lives of soldiers through the process of taking blood from a donor and relocating it into a soldier, sometimes for several different reasons, but mostly for when there was extreme amounts of blood lost. Found in the book, Blood Transfusions, it is said,…
Several discoveries caused this. In 1914 researchers found out that sodium citrate prevented blood from clotting. The next year, Richard Lewisohn found a safe concentration at which citrated blood might be transfused. “As this blood could also be kept in cold places for several days its effectiveness in war was clear. Traditional person-to-person transfusions were not always practicable. Instead blood could be collected, citrated, stored in bottles and transported to where it was needed. It was not until 1917 when it was first proved of its worth at the large base hospitals. Preserved blood was used at a Casualty Clearing Station in November that year.” ("Medicine at War." Making the Modern World. Science Museum, 2004) This provided new opportunities to save lives. Rather than waste time when wounded men arrived taking blood from donors, a ready supply was now available. By storing blood in advance the first Blood Depot (lately called the Blood Bank) was created. War helped discover the importance of blood transfusion, but this advance did not immediately transfer to civilian life. Although voluntary blood donations began in London in the early 1920s, the first blood banks did not appear until the late 1930s. Surgeons preferred to use fresh blood because of unusual conditions of…
Jehovah's Witnesses get their name from Jehovah, which is English version of the name given for God in the Hebrew Scriptures. The word Witnesses is taken from the passage in Isaiah 43:10 “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord..." Jehovah's Witnesses are a high strength religious group that requires a major obligation from its associates. Witnesses now have approximately six million publishers and pioneers in more than 75,000 congregations in over 200 nations. There are approximately one million Jehovah's Witnesses in the U.S., and just over 100,000 in Canada. They have also expanded extensively throughout Europe and Russia. They account for less than 1% of the population of all other nations in the world with populations over 50 million. . (Religious Tolerance)…
This paper will explore and identify the strategic performances of Religion Health Care. Religion Health care operates in a community of 225,000, called Middleville and are experiencing competition from other health care facilities in the area. In order to continue to maintain their productive, quality and patient centered performance, the facility has to make sure that there are no errors in its performance and its services rendered must be at its best. There are six core questions that this report will address regarding the strategic performance of Religious Health Care.…
The Healing Hospital paradigm does not only bring love and care back to health care but radical loving care to the bedside. This concept, although seemingly progressive, borrows and puts into action theories of such great theorist as Jean Watson that believe in treating the mind, body, and soul (Watson, 2009). The average hospital mission statement is filled with promises of caring compassionate health care, but as with society today, they are mostly talk and no action. The Healing Hospital brings the talk into action bringing the radical care from the management down, believing that each person has a calling not a job that simply ends in provision. The spiritual aspect is brought back into health care for the patients as well as the staff, where each meeting is considered a sacred encounter. Although this sounds like a hospital made in heaven, it is a reality for such hospitals as Baptist Trust in Nashville, Tennessee and Mercy Gilbert Hospital in Gilbert, Arizona (Chapman, 2007).…
Blood transfusions are sometimes administered to patients in specific circumstances such as cerebrovascular accident (stroke), acute chest syndrome, or when sickle cell crisis are so recurrent that damage to the organs occur (Brown, 2012).…
Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” – Psalm 139:13-16…