Complementary, Alternative and Integrative Approaches to Health
I have been a nurse for 15 years. I love nursing, and I recently decided to take a break from the bedside. I am currently a wound care nurse at a rehab facility. I have one little boy that I love so much. I am from Louisiana, and I got the best training at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. My goal is to finish with the BSN as soon as I can so I can finish up with my degree to become a nurse practitioner. I love shopping and traveling, but the most precious moments are spent with my son.
Working in a rehab facility, we do recommend journaling for patients. The benefits of improved mood, better memory, greater mindfulness, and reduced stress are some of the factors promoting its use. I understand journaling has been shown to reduce symptoms in cancer patients and improve patient outcomes after a heart attack. For addiction, it is a cheap and readily available form of therapy, which is a way of generating ideas to explore while in individual sessions, turning the patient into a kind of co-therapist for him or herself. It reduces stress and improves mental health. It may even lower the risk of relapse.
Over the past decades, complementary and alternative medicine has gained acceptance among the American people. To regulate the use of CAM, it has been care, and organizations have tried to incorporate relevant and validated CAM and conventional medicine into integrative medicine, a single discipline. Bahall & Edwards (2015) argue that the use of CAM s increasing worldwide with up to 61% of cardiac patients with coronary artery disease, 26 to 42% of patients at risk or diagnosed with cardiovascular disease using CAM. An estimated 15 million patients in the USA see a CAM practitioner annually. The reasons for its use include perceived mode of action in its natural character, holistic care, and improved quality of life. Patients argue that CAM overcomes the limitations of conventional medicine, and most are satisfied with CAM’s ability to prevent/counteract adverse effects caused by conventional medicine (Bahall & Edwards, 2015).
A discussion I have had with a patient with chronic wounds includes highlighting the accompanying range of distressing symptoms that the chronic wounds patient may undergo. Management of wounds was primarily aimed at reducing the impact on the patients and their families. Despite good quality wound management and care for patients in the facility, I opted to highlight the ways of facilitating best practice combining evidence-based care in conventional medicine and CAM addressing physical, psychosocial, and spiritual components of the whole person. Holistic care was taken into account for patients as part of wound management for my patients with complex and/or chronic wounds.
I do feel it is my responsibility to educate myself on primary complementary, alternative, or integrative modalities. Glowing recommendations and tributes make CAM and integrative approaches usage irresistible. CAM has been credited for positive clinical outcomes and boasted of its improved quality of life with significant improvements in clinical symptoms. I will be more at ease recommending CAM treatment products, which I have researched on, and I am assured of the positive benefits. Patients wish to get as much information as they could on these products, their side effects, and how they work on the human body (Bahall & Edwards, 2015). With such empowerment, it would facilitate appropriate decision making from healthcare providers.
Reference
Bahall, M., & Edwards, M. (2015). Perceptions of complementary and alternative medicine among cardiac patients in South Trinidad: a qualitative study. BMC Complement Altern Med, 15, 99. Retrieved from 10.1186/s12906-015-0577-8