Larry, I am so sorry that you friend is suffering. I will include her in my prayers tonight.
I found this article on AJWRB's website and believe it is relevant and hope it is of interest to you both:
The Murky Boundaries of the Watchtower Society
Osamu Muramoto , M.D., Ph.D.
I want to introduce some interesting developments in JW blood treatment. Below is the copy of a recent article from Australia which reports the first case of the peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) autografting done on a JW patient. When WTS permitted bone marrow transplants (BMT), I thought that this new technique would be the next logical step. Now, it's finally been done on a JW patient. To explain in plain terminology, when patients with leukemia and other cancer receive heavy doses of chemotherapy, their bone marrow fails and stops producing blood cells. BMT has been the way to restore normal bone marrow function in those cases. Now in PBSC transplants, this can be achieved by reinfusing a part of the patient's white blood cells (called CD34+) which are predeposited when they are massively recruited after chemotherapy. This method is much more benign and less invasive than BMT. This is now frequently being used treating leukemia and cancer.
Article Title: Clinical and ethical issues in the treatment of a Jehovah's Witness with acute myeloblastic leukemia.
Article Source: Arch Intern Med 1997 Aug 11-25;157(15):1753-7
Author(s): Kerridge I; Lowe M; Seldon M; Enno A; Deveridge S
Abstract: We report the first documented case of the use of peripheral blood stem cell autografting in the treatment of a Jehovah's Witness with acute myeloblastic leukemia. This case illustrates the complex ethical and clinical issues that arise in the treatment of such patients.
Author's Address: Health Law and Ethics Program, University of Newcastle, Australia.
Now, in terms of JW doctrine, this is another interesting contradiction, because the white blood cells used in this treatment are collected with leukapheresis (a machine to selectively collect white blood cells from the donor's blood) and deposited and then reinfused to the patient later. This is exactly the same procedure as white blood cell transfusion which is prohibited in the current blood doctrine. The only difference is that the name of the procedure is called "autografting", which sounds more like transplants than transfusion, and the setting of leukapheresis is for CD34+, rather than usual granulocyte.
Here is an interesting paragraph from this article.
When a Jehovah's Witness is diagnosed with AML, it is important that these issues are confronted immediately. Any new forms of therapy, such as the use of autologous stem cell grafts, should be discussed with patients early in the course of the disease. Patients will then frequently seek advice from the Jehovah's Witness liaison committees about the therapies in question. In considering bone marrow transplants and peripheral blood stem cell autografts in this case, the local committee sought further advice from Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States but decided, in the end, that the use of these techniques was up to the conscience of the individual concerned.
My feeling is that if the procedure had been presented as essentially the same as "white blood cell transfusion", WTS would have said "no". In this case, it was presented as the same as "bone marrow transplants", and the WTS said "OK, conscience matter". I think this is a good case to show how arbitrary and how murky is the boundary between permitted and prohibited treatment
