I have been interested in Holistic Nursing for a long time. The American Holistic Nurses Asso touts themselves as the only "official" certifying entity, and in the past, you had to have a bachelor degree and be a RN to even apply. I went to their site and they now have a path for associate degree RN's.
I have a book "Holistic Nursing" :A Handbook for Practice by Barbara Montgomery Dossey that is endorsed by the American Holistic Nurses Asso on the practice of holistic nursing. I have the 3rd edition, but Amazon has a new 5th edition. I can't tell you how wonderful this book is. It is worth every penny it costs.
After reading this book and understanding what Holistic Nurse Practice really is, I contacted my State Board of Nursing. As long as I stay within the parameters of my scope of practice as outlined by my BON, not only is it legal for me to be an independent RN with my own practice, but when you read the above handbook, you realize that everything in that book is nothing more than our scope of practice applied. Most all is patient teaching and empowerment: helping people set health goals r/t nutrition, weight loss, smoking cessation, stress reduction, exercise etc. Where you will get into trouble is if you recommend ANY type of "medication" including herbs and vitamins in a pill form. However, if you encourage eating more veggies high in vit B and help a person identify what those veggies are, or if you encourage them to use a wide variety of herbs to flavor their foods, then you are accomplishing the same, but in a holistic way and within our nursing scope of practice. (I hope this ramble makes sense.)
Now, go to the new draft for Healthy People 2020 and see that health literacy for people will be the main objective for the coming years. Patient teaching! Even Healthy People 2010 has education and community based programs as one of the objectives, but Healthy People 2020 takes it further and proposes that physicians refer patients to a healthcare provider that does patient teaching. "Increase the proportion of people whose doctor recommends personalized health information resources to help them manage their health." and "Personalized health information resources to increase health literacy levels" and "Connect to health outcomes so interventions could be tested for effectiveness." These are just some of the points being worked on for the Healthy People 2020.
So, getting back to my reason for posting. Let's brainstorm. If we want to have a Holistic Nursing Practice, what do we need to do------and I don't see where we MUST be a APN to do this. I have been a nurse for 16 yrs. I am working on goals of reading and studying over the next year. I can see where I could have business cards and contact physicians about my services. Patients would have to pay for my services out of pocket, but I think there would be patients that would/could do that if my fees were reasonable. Holistic nursing seems to be sort of like a Health coach. I also realized that if I'm going to coach/teach someone on weight loss, I can't need to lose 20 lbs myself. I can't coach/teach nutrition if I'm still eating fries and drinking sodas myself. So, I see that this journey for me will start with ME.
