I have not watched the Watchtower video. But I am familar with it - I found the DVD in a research hospital's library a few years back.
But, I did encounter Dr. Boyd in this article from 1996: Jehovah's Witnesses leading education drive as hospitals adjust to No Blood requests.
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/eppp-archive/100/201/300/cdn_medical_association/cmaj/vol-154/0557e.htm
Charland is director of hospital information services for the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Canada, which represents more than 200 000 Jehovah's Witnesses. He and some of his colleagues were at Dalhousie to give a presentation, "Meeting the challenge of nonblood medical management." It is part of a larger effort to educate the medical community about the Jehovah's Witness position on blood and to promote "bloodless" medicine and surgery in Canada. In recent years, Charland and other Watch Tower representatives have visited more than 10 medical schools and 200 hospitals across the country.
This was their third appearance at Dalhousie, where their presentation is now part of an undergraduate curriculum unit. Charland provided students with a brief overview of the medical interventions Jehovah's Witnesses will and won't accept, and then explained the biblical basis for their beliefs. He also discussed the ethical issues surrounding the doctor-patient relationship and the treatment of Jehovah's Witness children, and described how his organization -- through access to experienced specialists, hospital liaison committees, and online research -- can assist physicians in caring for church members.
This was the Society's sales pitch at that seminar, which Dr. Boyd was present at:
"Worldwide," he said, "there are some 100 bloodless medicine and surgery centres or programs offered in tertiary, regional and teaching hospitals." There are 52 of these hospitals in the United States alone, which assure patients that blood will never be used. As one ob/gyn resident remarks later in the session, "these centres must be inundated with people - everyone wants [to go] bloodless these days."
That trend has not been lost on Charland and his colleagues, and they believe it's only a matter of time before bloodless medicine and surgery programs begin to emerge north of the border. "In Canada, we don't think it's a question of whether," Charland said. "It's a question of where first."
Bloodless medicine and surgery programs "embrace all the specialties where blood transfusions could become a consideration," he says. According to Watch Tower literature, the programs include a coordinator, "a core team" of specialists willing to treat patients without allogeneic blood, hospital policies and procedures that facilitate patient care (such as patient forms and identification), and mobilization of appropriate treatment techniques and protocols.
He adds that many hospitals have implemented various components, and four want to take a more "formalized or institutionalized approach." But it hasn't been an easy sell. Although blood usage has been decreasing here, Charland says Canada is "conspicuously absent" from the list of more than nine countries where bloodless programs have been set up in response to the needs of Jehovah's Witnesses and the wishes of other patients.
He cites several reasons for the lukewarm reception. "At first glance there isn't an immediate financial incentive," he says. "Administrators and doctors in Canada have a difficult time visualizing how this saves the system money. . . . Many are working with the old myth that blood is free. They're not looking at the direct or indirect cost of blood-transfusion therapy."
Dr. Pinkerton was not in support of bloodless surgery programs:
"I don't see these programs serving any useful purpose," adds Dr. Peter Pinkerton, director of clinical pathology at Sunnybrook Health Science Centre in Toronto. "What we should be doing is trying to reduce transfusions across the board. This concept is the extreme end of a continuum. . . . You can carry this too far - you can start denying transfusions to people who should really receive them.
"Obviously with Jehovah's Witnesses you have to respect their religious beliefs and refrain from giving any blood product, but [for] any other patient you give them as little as you can reasonably get away with [while] maintaining their clinical condition."
But Dr. Boyd did support a bloodless program:
On the other hand, suggests Dr. Mark Boyd, bloodless programs may have beneficial side effects. Boyd, head of gynecology at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, has performed more than 500 procedures on Jehovah's Witnesses and can recall only one of his non-Witness patients being transfused in the past 5 years. "I think it's positive," he says of bloodless programs. "Blood isn't a popular product, particularly in the last decade."
Boyd recently completed a study of 100 hysterectomy patients who refused blood transfusions, and about 10% were not Jehovah's Witnesses. He says all did well and left the hospital at the same time as patients in the control group. Furthermore, of the 10 control patients who received blood, 8 transfusions "were unnecessary." Boyd, who is not a Jehovah's Witness, believes bloodless programs could make physicians more aware of preventing the need for transfusions in other patients. "The recognition that it's possible to do these things and to formalize them and have people try to make decisions before an actual crisis is important," he says. "There's nothing radical about the Jehovah's Witness approach, and everybody is capable of it . . . but it's not something that everyone is comfortable about doing."
Note the 90 JW women that he used in a medical study.
Nice having a willing group like that to try out radical approaches to health care.
No wonder he supported the Watchtower - they were sending him subjects for his medical research.
And, unrelated to the doctor opinion - later in the article there is this:
In Chicago, however, Jan Castro Graziani recommends "a formal setup." Castro Graziani is coordinator of the Center for Bloodless Medicine and Surgery at Our Lady of Resurrection Medical Center, which was established in 1987 and is the oldest bloodless centre in the United States. She describes the Chicago centre as, essentially, a hospital department. When patients are admitted, they sign the appropriate forms and receive blue wristbands and blue coding on their chart. Then they are streamed into the normal patient population.
Jan Castro Graziani is a Jehovah's Witness. Many, if not all, of the Bloodless Institutes established in the States were started and maintained by Jehovah's Witnesses.
