@djeggnog wrote:
How did you know [acute thrombocytopenic purpura] ... was a textbook case, @TD?
@TD wrote:
I have medical textbooks that illustrate and describe it. Long story, but I worked in a med lab years ago.
Ok. I did realize the sensitive nature of the questions I asked you in my last post, but I have all of the textbook cases here (this, of course, would be to exaggerate what I do have here), but I understand thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura to be something that one inherits from their parents who each carry the mutated gene. I have no information about thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura that is caused by the ingestion of prescription medication that isn't the result of genetic inheritance. For this reason, I'm not willing to assume that "acute thrombocytopenic purpura" is the same as "thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura," but I've just made a note to myself to learn the medical significance of "acute" in this regard.
You are always saying something that makes me give more than just a little thought as to how I'm going to respond answer, and when making the kind of inquiry I made of you regarding a family-related matter, I struggle with how I may tactfully pursue such an inquiry without causing anger to flare up over my apparent insensitivity because of my desire to learn more than you may be prepared to share with a stranger.
I'm am opportunist in the sense that I pretty much know where all of the proverbial buttons are, but I will push some of them anyway (like I did recently in my message to @Mary during our discussion about her brother) because I don't care for sugar-coated responses to what I might say. IOW, I didn't say to @Mary, who indicated that her brother was in the advanced stages of "a horrifying form of leukemia called Myelodysplasia," nor do I say to you here upon your describing that from which your son suffered as "acute thrombocytopenic purpura," as horrific and emotionally daunting as these events in your lives were, respectively, I don't get why @Mary concluded that "a blood transfusion would have saved the life of my brother had he not been so concerned about being shunned by his 'cult' for doing so," or that "my son would surely have died had I been crazy enough to have abided by the beliefs of my wife's 'cult' and withheld my consent to his having a blood transfusion." Perhaps you read@jgnat's posts in which he characterized both you and @Mary as being experts on blood transfusions, and I'm thinking that what @jgnat was really saying is that he regarded the two of you as being experts on the life-saving properties of blood, which is interesting.
Concerning the two of you, @jgnat went on to say that "both became experts in their loved-one's diseases," to which I replied that "I am an expert," but what I did not say was that I'm not the kind of expert that becomes such by merely observing the human condition. No, I became an expert by (1) listening to the experiences of others -- experiences like @Mary's, like yours -- then (2) going to a public library, opening up several books and doing some research on a particular aspect of the human condition, and (3) acquiring knowledge about things that cannot be learned by reading Wikipedia articles and performing searches using one's browser when sitting at your PC in the comfort of one's home.
Really, the only things that one is going to learn on the 'net are only those things that folks think important enough to upload to a web page or contribute to a forum like this one or written to an internet chatroom or maybe to their blog. Indeed there are many "experts" on the 'net, but a mere fraction of the things I've learned can be found through an internet search, so even when reading me, one comes away having knowledge that is incomplete at best.
I did touch upon DNA earlier in this thread because I wanted to let @cofty know that he cannot pretend to know things about blood -- hemoglobin/haemoglobin to be specific -- when speaking to someone that is knowledgeable about blood, someone that would likely discern the line in him where knowledge ends and his ignorance about this subject begins, but there are a few things that scientists today do know:
Of the 3,000,000,000 characters that are found in our DNA, there are only 23,000 protein coding genes in human beings, meaning that 98% of our DNA doesn't code for proteins at all, but which are responsible for making the stuff in our bodies, and this especially includes human blood since the red blood cells are what carry oxygen to the various parts of the human body, and there are pieces of DNA that scientists refer to as switches which turn certain genes on or off. However, certain sequences of DNA's chemicals are responsible for throwing these "switches."
When in your wife's womb, certain genes within the embryo that became your son were turned on at certain times, and at certain points during his development, these genes may have been turned off again. Every human being is born with defects that become more and more apparent as the embryo develops, and very often we might not know how these defect will reveal themselves until, for example, we discover that we are diabetics due to a failure of the pancreas to produce enough insulin (called "Type 1") or due to what some people attribute to obesity or age (called "Type 2"). Whatever the reason, it's hereditary and, in the case of your son, "thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura" is hereditary, and if "acute thrombocytopenic purpura" turns out to be the same thing, then we're talking about a genetic defect caused by "switches" that were turned on or off following your son's conception.
This is the science involved and evolutionists are often heard saying these genetic defects, mutations, but the chemicals responsible for throwing these "switches" in our genes are in our DNA by design, some intelligent designer figured out how the three billion characters of our DNA would produce the 23,000 coding genes discovered by the Human Genome Project to exist in human beings. An ear of corn has some 32,000 coding genes and yet I've never seen an ear of corn actually do anything, but taste good with a little butter. In my formative years, I played a trombone, an alto sax and keyboards, and I've never heard of an ear of corn board a plane, take a cruise, board a train, or even sing, but I can do these things and have a spiritual relationship with the very God that gave me the ability to do all of these things with my "measly" 23,000 coding genes.
And you will notice, @TD, that blood has nothing to do with this science. This means that whether your son receiving a blood transfusion or not wasn't a relevant factor in your son's medical condition, but you were told that your son's platelet count was <10, and that <10 was life threatening. The human body contains plasma, which makes up about 55% of the blood, and red cells, about 45%, whereas platelets make up a negligible, but very important amount, about 0.17%, and just as negligible, but an important amount, white cells, about 0.1%.
What I'm not understanding here, @TD, is that it seems to me that there was an extremely high platelet count, called "thrombocytosis," where bleeding episodes are rather common, especially because some platelets don't function correctly (if these platelets should be abnormal forms, then the coagulation process doesn't work). A normal platelet count ranges between 150,000 and 350,000, and while platelet counts of <50 put patients at risk of severe bleeding, platelet counts of <20 can cause spontaneous and fatal intracranial bleeding. A hematologist would be very concerned if the platelet count were to drop to <5 for then we would be in the realm of bleeding that could be fatal, but anyone presenting with such a low platelet count would be a candidate for platelet infusion, which I assume was done in your son's case.
In this case, it was an adverse reaction to a prescription medication. When the membranes of cellular blood components become damaged, they're flagged by the attachment of antibodies and destroyed by special cells in the liver and spleen. There are a number of drugs that also attach themselves to blood cells at the molecular level and sometimes the body gets confused. Even salicylic acid can lower your platelet count slightly. The much more severe effect is a rare, but known side-effect of some medications. This is distinct from an identical condition with an entirely different cause known as Immune thrombocytopenic purpura. In this condition, the body is actively producing an antibody against its own platelets. Treating ITP can be much more difficult for obvious reasons.
Corticosteroid drugs, prednisone and methylprednisolone are typically used to treat idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, prednisone for lupus, but what kind of blood transfusion was indicated if your son was somewhere between <10 and <5? There are reticulated platelets (immature platelet fraction (IPF) and plasma thrombopoietin (TPO)) that are blood fractions, and these are not the same as a blood transfusion. Was your son taking aspirin or penicillin at the time? Had he suffered an injury where his spleen was removed? We're here talking about one blood component here -- platelets -- and not all four whole blood components, right?
@djeggnog wrote:
You're probably right, but did [your] wife, who is one of Jehovah's Witnesses, accept these Jewish teachings that were evidently at play here? If so, what was your wife willing to accept that you have reason to believe other Jehovah's Witnesses do not?
@TD wrote:
Consent only requires the signature of one parent. This was a very stressful episode in our relationship and that's all I'm going to say.
Ok.
What I was referring to is the tendency of what appear to be some very young JW's on the internet to state the phrase, "Abstain from blood" as an explicit prohibition against transfusion medicine.
An "Abstain from..." construction is not grammatically complete when it references a physical object. We can easily test this by attempting to state the negation of action as a simple finite negative. The fourth and last abstention is a good example. It is different from the first three, because "fornication" is the name of a finite act. Therefore we can easily state that abstention as a finite negative by converting the noun form of the word to its verb form:
"Do not fornicate."
We can't do this with the other three abstentions because they are the names of physical objects and consequently do not have verb forms. Expressed as a finite negative, what does it mean to "abstain...from things sacrificed to idols?"
"Do not ______"
The idol sacrifice is the object of the abstention, but it's not the act to be abstained from and we need a finite act to have a complete thought. Most Christians understand this to be an injunction against partaking of the idol sacrifice as a formal act of worship. Pragmatically speaking, it means, "Abstain from idolatry" even though "idolatry" is not specifically stated. Idolatry would be one of the "things" to carefully keep yourself from; not the idol sacrifice per se.
I now believe I understand the point you're making here, @TD, but what the Bible means at Acts 15:29 really isn't all that difficult to comprehend, unless one was against the stand that Jehovah's Witnesses take with regard to blood transfusions and then, purely on the premise that our position on blood transfusions has changed, they accuse us of having changed our position on blood transfusions to permit blood fractions after so many folks died due to their adherence to our (former) position on blood transfusions. I can positively state here that the premise of this particular objection is not correct. The position of Jehovah's Witnesses with regard to blood transfusions has not changed.
I'll get back to what Acts 15:29 says in a moment, but I have a perfect analogy that will explain the viewpoint of what some Jehovah's Witnesses has always been:
Some 10-15% of people here in the US are "at risk" for an anaphylactic reaction if exposed to one or more allergens, peanut allergy is one of such causes. Some folks may be allergic to eggs, milk, wheat and shellfish, but people that are allergic to peanuts cannot, of course, eat peanuts nor eat mixed nut or trail mixes, if these should contain peanuts, and, as you can imagine, they cannot eat peanut butter, nor peanut brittle, PayDays, M&M-peanut and Goobers candy, and, oh, yeah, those ice-cream cones with the nut topping that are typically sold in supermarkets.
The doctor, and I'm not talking about Jehovah God, but your doctor tells you to "abstain from peanuts," and when you hear these words, you take from them the understanding that if you do not want to find yourself back at the hospital, you will have to lay off the peanuts. You will have to force yourself to avoid eating anything that contains peanuts. If you happen to have a sister-in-law, like I do, who will routinely toss a few nuts as a topping for one of her cakes, (i.e., a German chocolate cake), and you happen to be her nephew, Eric, with the peanut allergy, but Eric should fail to remember to scrape off the frosting before you sit down to eat any of this cake, then Donna will not have abstained from peanuts and his parents will likely have to swing by the hospital on the way home.
Now Eric's mother is just poking around at home one day when she happens to start reading the ingredients of certain non-edible household products to discover when she opens the medicine cabinet: Tannic acid, which is used in some medicines as a cure for anti-diarrhea (albumine tannate) and there is also a can of wood stain containing tannic acid in it, and both of these were made from peanuts. The glycerine soap and shampoo in the bathroom were made from peanuts. There's some hand cleaner in the garage that was made from peanuts. But Eric has used all of these products without incident in the past, and he continues to do so. What he hasn't done though is ingested any of them.
Another way to look at the same phenomenon it is to examine how the meaning of an "Abstain from" construction can change depending upon the context in which it is spoken:
"Her obstetrician said, 'Pregnant women should abstain from alcohol.'"
"His dermatologist said, "Persons with sensitive skin should abstain from alcohol'"
Even though both doctors have explicitly said, "Abstain from alcohol" they're not talking about the same thing. We would understand the former to be a reference to drinking alcoholic beverages and we would understand the latter to be a reference to the topical application of alcohol. Although alcohol is the object of the abstention, the respective acts to be abstained from are derived from the context.
God's word is clear than this: One doesn't need a professor to comprehend the meaning of Acts 15:29, and the context is quite clear:
"Keep abstaining from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication. If you carefully keep yourselves from these things, you will prosper. Good health to you!"
There are four (4) things named in this verse, the first one, to abstain "from things sacrificed to idols," refers to the meat offered as a sacrifice as part of some religious ceremony. The parallel to this is when I walk into someone's office and someone shoves a slide of chocolate cake at me. Happy Birthday! As a mature Christian, it's not likely that I do anything as immature as to decide to make a formal declaration to everyone in attendance that I don't celebrate birthdays, but what I do is excuse myself and secret away that slice somewhere and plan to return to that secret place late to eat that slice of cake after all of the festivities are over.
I love chocolate cake and there's nothing wrong with eating cake, just as there was nothing wrong with the meat that had been offered as part of some religious ceremony, but if such were to be eaten in the place where people had gathered to worship a false god, then it would be inappropriate for a Christian to eat such meat under these circumstances, for such a religious act would constitute idolatry. I don't know whether or not you knew this already, @TD, so if you should disagree with this explanation, that's ok, but this view is the one held by Jehovah's Witnesses. BTW, this decree from the governing body to which Acts 15:29 refers occurred in the year 49 AD, and contrary to what some religionists are wont to say, based on their reading of Paul's words at 1 Corinthians 8:7-13, 10:25-33, it was in was after he had written his second letter to the church in Corinth -- 55 AD -- that Paul is found to be in harmony with what James and the other older men say to him there when reference is made to this same degree at Acts 21:17-26.
The second one, to abstain "from blood," means that it cannot be eaten or taken into our bodies in any form, whether this be orally by drinking a cup of it or intravenously. Some of the people that have posted to this thread object to Jehovah's Witnesses' using blood fractions, since none of these products would be available to them were it not for the donations that people volunteer to blood banks where such whole blood is stored, except all of such people fail to realize that God does not forbid these folks from donating their blood to blood banks. Now Jehovah's Witnesses know that were they to donate their blood to these blood banks, that their donated blood would more likely than not be used by a doctor in a medical context that includes one or more blood transfusions, so they would not make donations of their blood to blood banks. But they also know that all such blood belongs to God, that despite the various blood types in existence today, it is all just "one blood":
Acts 17:26, KJV:
And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.
Acts 17:26, NWT:
And he made out of one man every nation of men, to dwell upon the entire surface of the earth, and he decreed the appointed times and the set limits of the dwelling of men.
Jehovah's Witnesses also know as God's people that they cannot be excused for doing things that other people might do in their ignorance. See my point below with respect to "things strangled" below. Likewise, it is not impermissible for Jehovah's Witnesses to use such products if made from any of the four components of blood provided (1) the product of interest should be a "nutrient" derived from one of these blood components and (2) they should choose to do so, for such blood fractions are no longer blood, so that would not be reusing it in their own bodies, and they may conscientiously choose to accept or reject such nutrients (fractions) in connection with the medical treatment they receive.
The position of Jehovah's Witnesses with respect to the use of blood has not changed: We don't eat it, we don't accept transfusions of whole blood, and we don't accept blood transfusions of any of the four components of whole blood. Blood, as long as it is blood, was put on God's altar to atone for sin, and it foreshadowed the sacrificial value of Jesus' blood, and this is the reason we do not eat blood sausages, for example, and why we do not accept blood transfusions since God requires that all blood be poured out in symbolically returning the life represented by the blood to Him, so we cannot condone blood being transfused into our bodies since we know that God has commanded His people to "abstain ... from blood" and transfused blood would constitute reuse of blood that God requires to be returned to Him. There is no prohibition, however, on the use of blood fractions since a fraction is not blood itself, but a nutrient derived from a blood component.
The third one, to abstain "from things strangled," means that it would impermissible for Jehovah's Witnesses to eat unbled meat. For example, at Deuteronomy 14:21, the nation of Israel was permitted to sell the unbled meat that they were unable to eat themselves to foreigners who may have had their own uses for such carcasses.
"You must not eat any body already dead. To the alien resident who is inside your gates you may give it, and he must eat it; or there may be a selling of it to a foreigner, because you are a holy people to Jehovah your God."
I believe @cofty had asked me a similar question in one of his posts, but I didn't have the time to re-work my post to include a full response to his question, so that I answered it in a limited fashion, so, hopefully he'll see that I've answer it here. Now if Christians could not consume blood contained in meat from a strangled creature, it stands to reason that we cannot consume the blood from a living creature either.
The last one, to abstain "from fornication," simply means that no one is having sexual relations with someone else to whom they are not married, whether those relations should be between a man or a woman, or between two men or two women. It should be patently obvious that the marriage of two gay lovers is not a union that God would recognize, and such a union would not be recognized as either "holy" or a "marriage," since the marriage institution ordained by God involves a man and a woman. (Matthew 19:4-6, 9)
But what may not be so obvious is the fact that even if a married person should be separated from his or her spouse and it is clear that they will not be reunited again as husband and wife, unless and until a divorce granted upon the grounds of fornication has occurred, the separated married couple are deemed to be married, so absent a divorce, the separated person is still married and is, therefore, not having sex with anyone else, since he or she is still "one flesh" with his or her spouse, 'as long as his or her spouse shall live.'
In context, the reference to blood in the Apostolic Decree is a reiteration of the existing prohibitions against eating blood. If transfusion is wrong, it's wrong because it is either physically or morally equivalent to eating blood and the Biblical condemnation is implicit rather than explicit. I don't know why anybody would think it's okay to lift an incomplete phrase from a specific ruling made in regard to a specific problem at a specific point in the early history of Christianity and invoke it in an entirely new context. I'm not accusing you of this, I'm just venting a little frustration I've experienced
At least now you have yet another opinion from one of Jehovah's Witnesses that may (or may not!) help you to understand the position of Jehovah's Witnesses, but I will say though that it is a problem that so many of Jehovah's Witnesses today seem to have put their faith in what they have read in the Watchtower or in one of our other publications and not in the Bible, because although they may have been associated with Jehovah's organization for 10, 20, 30, 40 years or even longer, and they have studied many of our publications thoroughly, they have never learned how to study the Bible, so they really do not know what it says. Some of the people on JWN that were formerly Jehovah's Witnesses are not apostates at all; what they are is ignorant. Steps are always being taken to invite all such folks who have left us for any reason, including being disfellowshipped because of their being mistreated by their local elders, to return.
I observed that JW's with academic qualifications in this area avoid that pitfall and some, like Rolf Furuli for example, have produced some very elegant reasoning. But it is fatally marred by speculation.
Ok, but this would be your opinion, right?
I don't share my credentials or "academic qualifications" with anyone because my experience is that such information serves to alienate people from me so that they do not talk to me freely. Or, some people want to throw things at me to see how I would respond. This is a problem, but I'm not seeking anyone's glory, and I do not say this to suggest that Furuli is seeking glory from anyone.
I think it's probably a matter of perspective and would depend on whether or not a person believes that the scales need to balance. On one side of the scales, we have crystal clear, black and white, plain and unambiguous statements about the sanctity of the gift of life and the severe penalty associated with even contributing to the loss of life. If an emergency medical treatment like transfusion is to be declined regardless of the consequences, then it seems to me that justice would demand that we have something of equal weight to place on the other side of the scales.
Therefore it becomes important that any equivalency between the consumption of blood and the transfusion of blood is solidly demonstrated by premises that can be tested and proven and not simply assumed. I'm not saying this can't be done. I just saying I have yet to see it.
Blood is sacred; period. In a world where hardly anything today is viewed as sacred, not even marriage, there is nothing equivalent to the transfusion of blood. Nothing. It's sacred, it represents life, it foreshadowed Jesus' sacrificial blood, which he shed to atone for the sins of the world and it should not be reused for any reason. However, if blood should be removed from someone's body, for a blood test or for any other reason, its removal from the human body is not something prohibited by God, and if it was removed for a blood test, that blood should be properly disposed of.
If, however, a doctor should take blood from someone else's body and transfuse it into you body or transfuse blood previously removed from you own body and transfuse it back into your body, so that you are reusing either someone else's body or your own blood, then you would be in violation of God's command to "abstain ... from blood."
@jgnat:
Regardless of what agenda you arrived with on this thread, this is not about blood fractions.
Until reading this sentence in a subsequent post of yours, I didn't really know (or maybe I was trying to pretend not to know) that you had an ulterior motive for inviting me here to your thread. In the thread that led to me joining this thread, I referred to the "viability of bloodless surgery as an alternative to accepting blood transfusions," I had pointed out to you that "absolutely no sane person would ever voluntarily agree to undertake any medical procedure where there might be any degree of risk to the patient," and then told you that "I might be willing to discuss all of this in a different thread.... I told that "it's possible that I'll join your thread were you to start it."
When I joined this thread, I talked about the four blood components that "are now being processed in such a way that useful nutrients, called 'fractions' ... being used by doctors to treat patients for many illnesses." As a result, I am going to be withdrawing from it. I may or may not post other responses to your thread, but I'm pretty done with this one. Thanks for inviting me. It was a blast.
@djeggnog