By Patricia Pollman, RN, HN-BC, HTPA |
Holistic Nursing has at its core the art and science of Healing. It focuses on care for the whole person in body, mind, and spirit. Holistic Nursing promotes the optimal health and well being that is innate in all persons, across the span of their lives. Holistic Nurses draw from a wide array of complementary therapies and practices in their work and self-care, resulting in a variety of treatment options for treating the whole person. These treatments include:
1. Healing Touch
2. Clinical Aromatherapy
3. Holistic Stress Management
4. Integrative Imagery
5. Integrative Reflexology
Founded in 1980, the American Holistic Nurses Association is helping to transform health care by bringing concepts of holism to every area of Nursing Practice. Holistic Nurses work in all practice settings, helping people assume personal responsibility for wellness, healing and health. Holism is the view that an integrated whole has a reality independent of and greater than the sum of its parts. Holistic: is concerned with the interrelationship of body, mind, and spirit in an ever-changing environment.
“Nursing is an art; and if it is to be made an art, it requires as exclusive a devotion, as hard a preparation, as any painter’s or sculptor’s work; for what is having to do with dead canvas or cold marble, compared with having to do with the Living Spirit – the temple of God’s spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts; I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.”
- Florence Nightingale 1854
A Holistic Nurse will create and enter into a therapeutic relationship with their clients, co-creating a holistic plan for wholeness and enhancing one’s perception of health challenges, utilizing a natural systems approach of viewing dis-ease.
When selecting a Holistic Nurse as a member of your personal healing team, you empower yourself to take charge of your most valuable asset, your health and wellbeing. You will be supported in evaluating all aspects of your life, learning to optimize inner and outer harmony, and developing a plan to achieve good health.
Holistic Nursing is a certification achieved after completion of RN licensure. The profession of Holistic Nursing has attained nursing specialty status, with a defined scope and standards of practice, and is officially recognized by the American Nurses Association (ANA).
Examples of how a Holistic Nurse Consultation may serve you include:
• dis-ease prevention and health promotion
• enhancing healthy life style choices
• chronic pain & illness
• if you are undergoing cancer treatment
• planning & recovering from medical procedures &/or surgery
• holistic stress management
• peaceful deathing
• living holistically, in harmony as an individual, within a family, community and global world.
References:
1. www.AHNA.org.
2. Holistic Nursing. A Handbook for Practice, 4th ed., 2005.
For more info, call Patricia Pollman at 775-830-3413.
