The term “bloodless surgery” should not be taken literally. The patient will bleed. He or she just won’t receive a transfusion of allogeneic blood. That’s blood taken from someone else. It is the type of blood provided by blood banks.
People choose bloodless surgery either for religious reasons or personal preference. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, firmly believe that blood has sacred meaning and that it should not be removed from the body and stored, nor should someone else’s blood be taken in during transfusion.
Other people simply do not like the idea of putting a foreign substance in the body. The hepatitis scare in the 1970s and the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s made many people think twice about receiving blood.
Allogeneic blood transfusions also are very expensive. It is estimated that every unit of red blood cells that is transfused increases the cost of a hospital stay by $1,000 to $1,300.
Blood transfusion alternatives:
Blood salvaging: Blood that is lost during surgery can be collected, filtered, washed and transferred back into the patient.