nursingforsocialjustice

Sometimes I wonder, am I perpetuating a problem when am I trying to solve it?

Not long ago a nurse colleague asked me, “what is a nursing model without a medical model”? And so goes this idea that nursing cannot exist without medicine. We can get real deep and philosophical about this. What is the mind without the body? What am I, without you? What are these dualisms? But, I think that the point that nurse philosophers and theorists like Fawcett, Rogers, Parse, etc. were trying to make is, nursing as a discipline is not contingent on medicine as a discipline, this structure that we have is the way that things worked out, it is how the system exists today, and there are social, political, economic and cultural factors that got us here. Nursing as a profession exists the way it does today because of the way medicine exists today, but that does not mean this will be so until the end of time. That’s a really long time. Look at what has changed in the last 100 years. We do not have to keep going down the same road in the same car, especially if we want to get a chance to drive at some point. I mean, we can choose to get out an walk, or get a bike, or get on a bus.

Do you ever wonder if, at some point, a physician might ask, “but what does the nursing science say about this”? Or might they ever consciously use a nursing paradigm to inform their practice? I read an article about nurse physician relationships from 1991 today and was horrified. Physicians do not learn about medical models because there is only the one, and it’s what structures the entire system. Thank you medicine for colonizing healthcare. It was a different time I suppose. But I wonder about physician (not perception) understanding of nursing, because I read an article about holistic medicine, which seems to be a thing that emerged in the 90s and 2000s as a result of some reflection that disembodied curative focused models maybe weren’t the be-all and end-all to healthcare practice and there was no mention of the reality that this has been a front and center thing in nursing…the whole time that nursing has existed as a discipline?

Does it break anyone else’s heart that, while nurses are being critical of the structure of healthcare systems as a means of pursuing better patient care, the system might be set up to attributed any positive change to medicine and physicians, simply by default?

Peace,

Michelle D.

Adam, S., van Daalen-Smith, C., & Juergensen, L. (2019). The indispensability of critique: Reflections on bearing witness to mental health discourse. Witness: The Canadian Journal of Critical Nursing Discourse, 1(1), 39-48.