Nursevillage.com - Career Options : Treating the Whole Patient Body, Mind & Spirit

Imagine being brought into an Emergency Room after a terrible accident. Your bones are broken, you’re beside yourself with pain and you are absolutely terrified…until someone holds your hands and whispers in your ear, calmly, “Where do you want to be?” The soft sound of the voice transports you to a place of peace and comfort. You find yourself in your own paradise. You describe the palm trees swaying in the breeze, the warm sun on your face, the gentle lapping of the ocean waves - you are calm and at rest. You were on an imagery trip lead by a holistic nurse.

Treatments like imagery trips are not uncommon procedures for holistic nurses to perform. According to the American Holistic Nurses Association (AHNA), holistic nursing embraces all nursing, which has as its goal, the enhancement of healing the whole person from birth to death. The holistic nurse is an instrument of healing and a facilitator in the healing process. Holistic nurses honor the individual’s subjective experience about health, health beliefs, and values. The practice encourages peer review of professionals in various clinical settings and integrates knowledge of current professional standards, laws, and regulations governing the nursing practice.

New-Age Healing Is An Old Art Form

Holistic nursing is not a new practice. The nursing profession has a long history of caring for individuals in a holistic manner and integrating the healing arts with conventional treatments. In fact, Florence Nightingale herself recognized the importance of caring for the whole person and encouraged interventions that enhanced individuals’ abilities to draw upon their own healing powers. She considered touch, light, aromatics, empathetic listening, music, quiet reflection, and similar healing measures as essential ingredients to good nursing care. Today the education of our registered nurses is built on these same principles.

Practicing holistic nursing requires nurses to integrate self-care, self-responsibility, spirituality, and reflection in their lives. This awareness may further enhance the nurses’ understanding of all individuals and their relationships to the human and global community, and permits nurses to use this awareness to facilitate the healing process.

When It Comes To Healing There Are Alternatives

Many holistic nurses have studied and mastered different complementary and alternative therapies, such as Qigong, Reiki, Healing Touch and Therapeutic Touch. The AHNA believes that nurses have a natural instinct to want to heal patients not just physically, but emotionally, mentally and spiritually as well. Therefore, it is expected that nurses draw upon both principles of conventional techniques and alternative therapies.

Consistent with conventional nursing practice, nurses must be competent in the alternative therapies and practices they use. But as the AHNA points out, although selected alternative therapies are appropriate interventions for use by nurses, the use of these interventions must be integrated into a comprehensive holistic nursing practice. It is the nurse’s responsibility to obtain the necessary education and credentials associated with a specific therapy. It is also the nurse’s job to ensure that he or she operates within the legal scope of practice of the nurse’s licensure and jurisdiction.

Treating Yourself As Well As You Treat Your Patients

A key role of holistic nursing is self-care. Nurses are notorious for focusing so much of their energy on the care of their patients that they totally neglect their own well-being. Growing concerns of nurse burnout, personal illness, chemical abuse and even use of worker’s compensation, highlight this reality.

Remembering to take care of yourself is mandatory when it comes to the practice of holistic nursing. By nourishing yourself with a healthy diet, exercise, adequate rest, and also quiet reflective time, you will enhance the quality of your personal/professional relationship. By consciously choosing to take better care of yourself, you set a positive example for co-workers, family members, and patients to follow. Ultimately creating a ripple effect that can become quite powerful.

The Benefits Are Immeasurable

Holistic nursing offers nurses an opportunity to reconnect with the heart and spirit to bring out their full potential as healing partners. Grounding the nursing practice in a philosophical and theoretical foundation can serve as a springboard for a relationship-centered therapeutic partnership with patients. Creating an intention to enter into relationships from a place of a loving and caring heart, with full presence, compassion and kindness, becomes the basis for the high quality of care nurses provide their patients.

In an era of cost-cutting and HMOs, many nurses are searching for the one thing that can bring them back to the true reason they became a nurse — to help people. The answer to this plight may very well be holistic nursing.

Becoming a Holistic Nurse

A national certification process is now available for the specialty of Holistic Nursing. The American Holistic Nurses’ Certification Corp. (AHNCC) is the credentialing body for Holistic Nursing.

Certification in Holistic Nursing: