I'm writing this because there may be others like me out there before I realized that nursing has almost nothing to do with science, or medicine, and is often at odds with the medical community. These facts may have alot to do with why nursing is the Rodney Dangerfield of the hospital and "don't get no respect" from administration and has a poor public image.
I've spent the better part of the last year trying to rationalize nursing didactic focus. I can find no value in it that develops the critical thinking skills that those pronursing advocates would have you believe exists. I also don't understand how a bachelors degree in science can be awarded to a person completing four years of training in that supposed science with only a college level math and one lonely little chemistry course. I figured that the science in nursing would be unique, but not so unique that it did not resemble science at all. I kept waiting for the next set of classes to show some inkling of medical knowledge until the day I recieved the "pharmacology" packet. The one class out of twentyfive that had real promise of laying out some scientific information, but clung desparately to its psychosocial touchy-feely model. None of the contraindications were explored and the assessments all involved hypoventilation as a focus. The main theme for that packet was drug calculations, which are nothing more than operations with fractions. I could go on of course, but if you are a scientific minded person you have been feeling this since the prerequisites, so you know what I'm talking about.
Really, I should have given this up a semester ago, but I had to explore the possibility that it may have been just a poor attitude about something new. I can honestly say that the attitude belongs to nursing's curicculum. Ever since Florence Nightengale nursing has been struggling to define an identity. If they use the medical model they wouldn't be unique enough to justify a separate identity. That yearning for identity complicated the use of anything medical, though they obviously already had a separate identity within the medical model since the job desciptions between nursing and other allied contrast. I'm here to tell you that nursing has quite successfuly cut-the-cord. There is very little to hold interest to the scientificly minded individual. The problem with that course is that nursing is now so estanged from the medical community that birthed it, that it doesn't work in medicine at all. Nursing is psychology and philosophy, masqerading as a science. By its own efforts it has become so separated from medical thinking that it is now dysfunctional in it.
It is not you.
Nursing just doesn't work for someone that thinks about medicine. The students that are fond of the sciences now in prerequisites and loathe the psychology and developmental theories, will neverfind what they seek in a nursing program. You will be miserable, as I was, and you will make the people around you miserable.
You can't hold your breath until NP classes either. The same anti-medical thinking dominates that too. Save yourself, and your brilliant and exact medical thought process, and see nursing for what it is.
This past week I have prepared to start work on the pre-coursework sciences that I'm lacking for a degree in physiology and neurobiology. I will become a physician's assisstant. The curicculum in the last two years is the same medical model that the physiscians themselves trained in. It's the same program. I will then chose a specialty to train in and will diagnose and treat disease under the supervision of a physician as a colleague, not an adversary to thier philosophy of patient care.
