250,000 Jehovah's Witnesses have died refusing blood

by nicolaou 739 Replies latest watchtower medical

• 

  Simon

  they also make some of the typical questionable assumptions to arrive at their number

  Yes, taking figures of people who have already refused blood and then assuming that everyone else will refuse blood as well is only ever going to skew the numbers. Unless someone has figures of JWs who decided to accept blood it's impossible to apply numbers to the entire JW population. I think this mistake is being made over and over.

  How many muslims are willing to die as suicide bombers? Ok, count the number of suicide bombings ... now multiply by the number of muslims worldwide and ... HOLY CRAP WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE !!!

  But the truth is if you start by counting the extremists then you end up with extreme numbers that are not realistic. We know most muslims aren't suicide bombers and don't agree with it just as a significant number of JWs would never dream of letting their loved ones die over blood.

  Yes, we pity the ones who do chose to follow the word of some old croakes that they never have and never will meet. But it isn't as many as soom would seem to 'like' it to be.
• 

  Simon

  What is the grand solution to blood? Adults should be free to exercise their religious rights. The WT has never grabbed an IV out of the arm of someone receiving a blood transfusion. Responsibility must be with the individual. We are not China or North Korea. Individual rights are safeguarded.

  Yes, not only that, but there is Dr / Patient confidentiality, ultimately "no one needs to know" should be the message.

  JWs are a bunch of flawed people like any other group, all cheating, lying, screwing, doing what's best for them (yes, it's not just your congregation - they are all like that). Religious people are experts at lying, they do it all the time. It hardly seems a stretch to add one more to save a life.

  "Lie to the window cleaner in the shiny suit, he'll never know!"
• 

  Terry

  It is possible to stand too close and lose the big picture.

  A pointillist painting demonstrates.

  

  The closer you get to the "actual" details the more the purpose of the details is fuzzed out into a blur of irrelevency.

  

  To me, the question of death for children is an even greater tragedy when the death is PREVENTABLE except for a VALUE (faith) which is raised

  higher than the LIFE of the child.

  I'll say this one thing and move on. There would be no "values" possible if we were not alive.

  To put a belief, a faith, a doctrine or a policy into a greater position of VALUE than human life is a morbid insanity.

  The insanity of Jehovah's Witness "values" is a greater question than their so-called integrity which is nothing more than bull-headed stubborness.

  What parent actually believes Jehovah will forever condemn a child because the parent has agreed to medical treatment? Answer: NONE.

  It is the life of the Parent the parent is trying to save and THAT, my friends, is moral cowardice!

  A parent should be willing to allow their tribal deity, Jehovah, to obliterate them so that the child may live. That would be love. That would be value.
• 

  adamah

  BOTR said-

  I don't want a dinky religion.

  Is anyone else imagining t-shirts with the slogan "I don't want no dinky religion!" silk-screened on the front, and a JWN logo on the back?

  BOTR said-

  The best way to stop the blood doctrine is to change it from within or convince people that the Witnesses are too high control a group for practical reasons.

  Yup, and hence why individuals need to decide for themselves that their participation is unhealthy for not only others, but more importantly, THEMSELVES.

  Whether they can see it or not, the "no blood" policy is like playing Russian Roulette, where every day they remain a member is like pulling the trigger with a loaded gun with an unknown number of rounds and chambers, thus exposing themselves to an unnecessary and incalculable risk (and primarily because those who CAN provide hard data to calculate the actual risk obviously won't do so).

  

  Adam
• 

  OUTLAW

  verges on arguing how many angels can dance on a pin.

  After 8 beer I can tell you how many are Dancing at the Bottom my Beer Mug..

  ................................................259!!..

  .....................Fill up My Mug and Drown the Little Bastards!!..

  ...........................................

  ...................................................................................... ...OUTLAW
• 

  besty

  @marvin

  In year 1998 there were 5,544,059 JWs. You do the math and tell readers what a ratio of 3848-to-1 gives us for the year 1998 alone.

  1/3848 = 0.00025987525987526, or 0.26/1000 - I think we all get that you believe 0.26/1000 JW's will die of anemia on an annual basis.

  In lil'ole UK that would be in the region of 300+ people every year. I think we would have noticed. An Economist article this year on the blood doctrine had to refer back to a 2007 death for a relevant example http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2013/08/jehovahs-witnesses-and-blood - now why would the journalist trawl back to 2007 to get an example if there were hundreds of them occuring every year?

  The problem marvin is not the maths to arrive at your chosen answer once you have decided the values for all the variables. The problem is how you got to those values.

  I don't accept your extrapolation is valid, nor the way you are now presenting it is particularly forthright. You presenting your extrapolations as 'hard'.

  The Beliaev study gives us hard numbers saying over a 10-year period we have <speculation alert------> 33 statistical deaths among a community that averaged <Beliaev doesn't mention this figure------> 12,700 members annually over the same 10-year period. <evidently-----> Hence we have 3.3 deaths per year for 12,700 individuals per year. That’s an extrapolated ratio of 3848-to-1 annually. These are the <semi-----> hard numbers. These numbers are not a rate. They are hard. (not as hard as you would like Marvin - maybe you need a blood tranfusion :-)

  The hard numbers are 19 dead JW's in 4 hospitals over a 10 year period. The JW's and the control group were selected after the fact by Beliaev.

  The rest is your speculative extrapolation on top of your assumptions.

  eg - average number of JW's 12,700 - did you account for unbaptized publishers under the age of 15 being in the official JW figures, but which the Beliaev study would exclude, for example.

  I'm not saying your maths is wrong, or that your assumptions are not possible. Just that when I take a different approach I get a different answer, and there is a 13x difference in outcomes between our approaches.

  Just as I cannot get away from your maths, you cannot get away from mine., but thats not really the point.

  Have a nice day, and keep up the good work!

  @SBF - 13,700 over 5 decades globally - see page 4 of the thread :-)
• 

  Simon

  Lets push the russian roulette illustration a little further:

  Suppose someone points a revolver with one bullet in it to the head of a JW and says "If you tell me you are a JW, I will pull the trigger". How many JWs would still say they were a JW?

  The problem will all these stats is that they are looking at a pre-selecting group of JWs who refused blood. They said "Yes, I am one". Good for them (no, not really).

  Say as many as 50% are so convinced that they speak up and take the risk. If we only measure their outcomes (as the studies inevitably do) then we'll be assuming numbers that are 50% higher. If only 10% put their beliefs ahead of their lives then it would be 10x the figures.

  So, you apply those numbers to 'all JWs' and guess what? It's no surprise that the numbers are higher than are credible.

  In the NZ case, it's looking at 19 deaths out of 103 witnesses ... but what if it was 19 out of 303 witnesses instead? I don't believe the numbers who would refuse blood are even 1/3rd but things like this can make orders of magnitude difference to the final numbers.

  We should mistakenly equate "people who are JWs" with "JWs who refuse blood". The latter is always going to be smaller than the former, possibly by a large factor.
• 

  jgnat

  I'd make sure my JW got blood. He can complain later. When he's alive. To. Do. So.
• 

  Simon

  In the NZ case, it's looking at 19 deaths out of 103 witnesses ... but what if it was 19 out of 303 witnesses instead?

  And actually, I believe that this demonstrates a big flaw:

  Lets make it 19 out of 1000 for extra emphasis. Now the death rate for JWs in the study would be 0.019 or 1.9% ... hey, in fact, that is exactly the same as it was for the normal people who didn't refuse blood! So no more risk then for being a JW (vs refusing treatment).

  But, as per Marvin's calculation we still take the 12,700 average JWs in NZ and the 1.9 deaths per year comes to 0.015% again.

  I won't bore you with the rest of the math but notice, the vastly different death rate doesn't change the numbers AT ALL. The rest of the calculation still works out exactly as before and comes to the exact same result.

  Doesn't this seem, well, wrong? The patient risk this time was identical wasn't it?

  So, even if JWs died no more frequently than the general population then you'd still get the answer that 50,000 "died because of refusing blood".
• 

  steve2

  I write as a health care professional working in a regional hospital in New Zealand who has an intense interest in health outcome studies and who is reasonably familiar with principles of sound scientific research design.

  The varying statistics cited throughout this thread are all based on a highly suspect foundation; namely, that the numbers of JWs facing the need for blood transfusions - and, in particular, for specific blood disorders such as anaemia - are virtually similar from country to country so that the findings from one country (New Zealand) can be extrapolated not just to other countries but worldwide.

  Such a project is doomed because we do not know whether the numbers of JWs with blood disorders even in similar countries (e.g., Australia) are the same, let alone in very different countries (e.g., Ghana). Given the huge variability in health indicators even across similar countries there is absolutely no justification for extrapolating from a single study in one specific country to make worldwide estimates. It just smacks of research "gaming" that would be laughed out of peer-reviewed research "findings. It's a frank embarrassment akin to the knock-up research by Jerry Bergman - a worthy topic is treated with shocking superficiality.

  How the hell can you responsibly report your extrapolated results based on this single New Zealand study without making it very, very clear that it rests on an uncertain foundation?

  If it were a single study that had found blood refusals saved lives of Witnesses in a specific country and the organization's writers extrapolated from the single study to estimating the number of JWs saved worldwide, we'd rightly jump on those writers' facile conclusions like a ton of bricks.