Holistic Nurses
Continuing with our jaunt through the various types of nurses we come to holistic nurses. This can cause some confusion as “holistic” as a word really just means treating the whole, a veiled criticism of conventional medicine which attempts to treat the disease rather than the patient. But in this specific meaning “holistic”, as it refers to nurses, means those who use treatments like acupuncture, massage and aromatherapy.
Even this can be controversial as there are those who insist (and I’m often among them) that such alternative treatments are not in fact medicine at all. At one end of course this is true, waving crystals at someone does nothing at all for them. However, that’s not to say that these treatments don’t have a value at all: much of it is in the placebo value.
For example, let us take the example of someone who is a little run down, perhaps a touch depressed. Not to the point of needing happy pills or anything, just a touch of the glums. This can indeed lead to disease as even mild depression is correlated with a depressed immune system. How should we treat them?
We could be rather callous and simply tell them to get their act together but this is not known to be all that helpful. We could treat them with drugs but again, not all that helpful when side effects are taken into account. We could stick needles into them until they stop complaining but acupuncture doesn’t actually work that way, nor do the other complementary treatments. It’s that placebo effect that does though. Half an hour, an hour, of someone devoting their attention to us does in fact make us feel better. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Swedish massage or one with scented oils, we perk up and lose some of our depression.
Given that this is the way holistic medicine works, those best suited to it by our EQSQ personality tests are easy to identify: those with the most empathy, those at the female end of the personality tests’ results. Given that it is the human interaction, the care being shown, the empathy in fact, which effects the cure, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.
June 23rd, 2007 at 9:14 am
Tim! Massage, for one, has measurable health benefits: it reduces heart rate, lowers blood pressure, and increases blood circulation and lymph flow. A good friend of mine is a massage therapist, and she first got into the field because when she was in college, working out regularly with her friends, they started doing massages on each other and discovered their recovery time was quicker.
And massage has been around since as early as 3000 B.C.
As for acupuncture, for the past 30 years, many controlled studies have revealed it has helped with allergies, stroke rehabilitation, high blood pressure, incontinence, insomnia, and more. See http://www.compassionateacupuncture.com/research__on__the__health__benefits%20of%20acupuncture.htm.
I imagine aromatherapy would most often be used in conjunction with one of the above, or with something else, not alone.
Last, I don’t understand your differentiation between the “holistic†definition and the holistic nurse. I imagine that holistic nurses, or anyone who uses acupuncture, massage or aromatherapy to heal, would identify themselves as those who treat the whole.
July 2nd, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Tim,
Hmmm. I don’t think you can accurately dismiss all of holistic medicine as depending on the placebo effect. For example, just to take up the point about massage–infant massage has been proven to help pre-term infants thrive. They gain weight more quickly than non-massaged infants. Their immune systems perform more effectively. (Here’s some info on infant massage, for anyone interested). This improvement can’t be written down to a placebo effect. The infants don’t have some ‘notion’ that massage will help them—they simply physically respond to touch. Why would adults be different?
July 3rd, 2007 at 5:59 pm
I’m trying to make the distinction between “holistic” meaning “to treat the whole” and “holistic” whatever nonsense about crystals, ley lines and macrobiotic diets is in the newspapers this week. The former is valuable and the latter not.
I should have engaged my intelligence a little more of course. Millie, I make two references to the placebo effect and it’s the first (most) not the second (all) which is what I meant. I also blur the line between two effects: one, the placebo, in which someone expects to get better because they have taken a pill and thus expect to and the other, the fact that people do get better (sometimes) simply because someone is paying attention to them.
All of the intelligence (except in a very few cases, in which they quickly stop being alternative, holistic or complementary medicine and become conventional) that we get from testing is that it’s a combination of one or other of these effects that make such treatments work.
July 10th, 2007 at 12:20 am
Tim, I’m not sure that’s true–some studies have shown that acupuncture, for example, just works. Physically. It’s not a psychological effect. It’s easy enough to find studies that suggest acupuncture works. This article discusses some findings in Sidney Australia, for example, that demonstrate the effectiveness of acupuncture for treating post-operative nausea. Do you think the effectiveness is all just a psychological cocktail of feeling looked after and believing in the thing?
I don’t. Though I’m pretty skeptical about the likes of crystals. Any believers out there?
July 21st, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Millie, I really rather like the intelligence on offer in that article. In fact, most amusing. The result found was that a single needle in a single place reduced nausea: I have no problem with that idea at all. We know that there are nerve junctions throughout the body and blocking one of them might well have that effect.
But the author then goes on to explain how this isn’t real acupuncture at all: it’s as if his intelligence deserts him: sure, we’ve proved acupuncture works but what we’ve proved is not acupuncture.
Put it another way. We know that blocking the carotid artery induces blackout: that doesn’t mean that Dr. Spock’s Vulcan Death Grip exists.