Like many fellow students, I've got my nose in the Pocket Guide as a resource for using patient data to create care plans. My intent here is not to debate the usefulness of Care Plans or Nursing Diagnosis.
Quite a few authors have written about the pains the nursing profession has gone through to gain credibility, - from the public, from doctors, and from administrators. Our curriculum is lousy with buzzwords like Critical Thinking, Objective Data, Scientific Method, Theory....on and on.
According to a few authors, like Suzanne Gordon in "Nursing Against the Odds," Nursing Diagnosis is currently looked on by many outside nursing (and many inside) as unintelligible nonsense filled with verbal gymnastics to avoid mentioning medical diagnosis. Before we even began studying nursing process, one of my fellow students noted, "That Diagnosis stuff is pure BS." I didn't concur because I had not studied it yet. It looks to me like the system described could be useful.
But when you have something like "Disturbed Energy Field" as a NANDA-I diagnosis, aren't we just proving the critics right? One of the Nursing Priorities laid out in the Nurse's Pocket Guide is to, "Evaluate the Energy Field." This consists of "Moving hands slowly over client at a level of 2 to 6 inches above to the skin to assess the state of energy field and flow of energy within the system." There is more of this magician snake oil healer intervention the nurse is supposed to perform following that "procedure": "Perform unruffling process, keeping hands 2 to 6 inches away from client's body to dissipate impediments to free flow of energy within the system and between the nurse and the client."
Please. This new age claptrap was debunked decades ago. If you disagree, then you must be able to feel, manipulate, and heal energy fields and auras and whatnot. Good for you, a guy named James Randi has a million dollars waiting for you if you can prove it. Trouble is, every time a scientific inquiry was performed - the practitioner failed. Here's his website:
I'm fine if the client reports subjectively that their, "Chakras are jammed," or they are, "having trouble breathing through their left eyelid." But the acceptance of this snake oil - complete with shaman/nurse interventions - only hurts the profession and gives ammunition to those who belittle the Nursing Process
I don't have any problem with people seeking this type of healing intervention at all if they believe in it. But does it belong in the nursing profession? If a client claims they are possessed by a demon, we don't perform an exorcism for pity's sake. We call psych and social services right before the priest in that case (and keep an eye on all three of them!).
Why isn't this type of hoodoo kept in the psychic healer/palm reader/faith healer fraud shop where it belongs? Couldn't we at least ship it over to Chiropractic?
