When is a Nurse a Healer?

Understanding Nursing… Again

images-2 copy

Healing is to Suffering

What Curing is to Illness

This simplistic approach helps me break down the complexities of nursing.

And this helps me better understand nursing… Again.

Suffering is rooted in a patient’s experience of a health-illness event where there is pain, loss, an illness, a disease, a surgery/procedure, a trauma, a crisis, etc.

The patient’s experience is grounded in the meaning of the event to that patient.

Suffering is related to the meaning of the experience.

Each patient suffers differently,

although the health-illness event may be objectively the same for each patient.

Suffering is healed, not cured.

images-8 copy 3

Healing is from within, which comes from self-healing.

Caring promotes healing.

Patients suffer.

Healing is promoted within the patient when there is a shared understanding of the meaning of the event between the healer and the sufferer.

And that’s what transforms a nurse’s caring into healing.

That’s when a nurse becomes a healer.

Leave a Reply
