The January 8, 2000 Awake magazine published an article "The Growing Demand for Bloodless Medicine and Surgery". This article has been quoted extensively by JWs as support for their "scientific" justification for refusing blood products.
A quote from that article that is familiar to most JWs and exJWs is this one:
“All those dealing with blood and caring for surgical patients have to consider bloodless surgery.”—Dr. Joachim Boldt, professor of anesthesiology, Ludwigshafen, Germany.
Dr. Boldt has been exposed as a fraud.
From the British Medical Journal:
The withdrawal of almost 90 fraudulent studies by a German anaesthetist is one of the biggest medical research scandals of recent time. Jacqui Wise examines what happened and what lessons have been learnt
Joachim Boldt was a prominent German anaesthetist with an international research reputation. He was regarded as a leading specialist in intravenous fluid management and was an advocate for the use of colloids, particularly hydroxyethyl starch solutions, to boost blood volume during surgery.
However, a lengthy investigation has led to 88 out of the 102 studies that Boldt has published since 1999 being withdrawn from the medical literature. He has been found guilty of research misconduct, including failure to acquire ethical approval and fabrication of study data, and sacked from his position as professor at Klinikum Ludwigshafen, a large teaching hospital in Ludwigshafen, Germany, where he carried out his research. The retraction of such a large body of work has had far reaching effects on clinical practice, research oversight, and editorial policies.
And from The Daily Telegraph:
Millions of surgery patients at risk in drug research fraud scandal
Millions of NHS patients have been treated with controversial drugs on the basis of "fraudulent research" by one of the world's leading anaesthetists, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
Joachim Boldt is at the centre of a criminal investigation amid allegations that he may have forged up to 90 crucial studies on the treatment. He has been stripped of his professorship and sacked from a German hospital following allegations about his research into drugs known as colloids.
Experts described Mr Boldt's alleged forgeries as possibly the biggest medical research scandal since Andrew Wakefield was struck off last year for falsely claiming to have proved a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Guidelines for British anaesthetists regarding colloids – used to boost blood volume in patients undergoing surgery – are being revised after it emerged that four of the key studies on which they were based are to be formally retracted.
Mr Boldt, 57, was regarded as a leading specialist in intravenous fluid management, and his work was published widely in British medical journals.
He claimed to have proved that colloids were as safe as other, similar treatments despite earlier studies showing them to be more dangerous. Mr Boldt's alleged forgeries date back up to a decade.
Retraction Watch, a website that tracks the retraction of scientific papers, places Dr. Boldt as "second on the leader board" for number of scientific studies retracted:
Boldt’s retraction count upped to 94, co-author takes legal action to prevent 95th
...the ombudsperson has indicated the following in his letter to the journal: “In view of the inconsistencies and Dr. Boldt’s misconduct in this and many other aspects of scientific integrity, JLU recommends that journal editors retract all papers where Dr. Boldt is the responsible author even if there is no obvious indication of falsification. All articles by Dr. Boldt should be read with great caution because they may contain falsified data.”
If a person does a search for Dr. Boldt, they will find that some of Dr. Boldt's falsified research involved Jehovah's Witness patients and, his work has been used to bolster the position of "bloodless" surgery.
The Watchtower has yet to retract the damaging statement by Dr. Boldt and the quote is still used by many JWs to justify their no blood stance. Dr. Boldt's quote has no validity in the scientific world whatsoever - he is a fraud.