NURSING MOTHER ISSUES

Nursing mother issues

Nursing Mother Issues

Introduction

By contrast, the functional argument proceeds from a description of present nursing practices and a theoretical account of what nursing should be ideally. The actual details of the history of nursing and medicine may not demonstrate the divergence of their ethics and values. If one looks at function and if one subsumes present practice under nursing theory, one can see the difference that supports a different ethic. For example, in contemporary practice, the typical physician interaction with a patient is brief(Elsie, 1985). It is to get a medical history, symptoms and signs, consent to a proposed intervention, or compliance. All this serves the goal of cure. The physician reviews examination and test results, arrives at a diagnosis and therapeutic regimen. S/he writes orders, supervises specialists in administering therapeutic procedures, and checks on the patient's progress. By contrast, the nurse's interaction with patients is much more extensive and personal. It focuses on the patient's values and perceptions and adaptive/restorative processes. Nurses may have been co-opted as physician's assistants. Yet nursing ideally functions not as an extension of the physician but as a complement.( Elsie, 1985)

Discussion

A root metaphor is sometimes used, although its sexist overtones make it unfashionable among more politically minded nurses. Nursing has affinities with the maternal functions of nurturing, education and caring for the young. The term derives from the Latin "nutrio" meaning to nurture. Thus nursing is like ideal mothering. It fosters education, growth and protection of those in child like states where they are unable to provide for their own nurture. Medicine, by contrast, is not focused on nurture of health, but on combat with the enemies of healthdisease, malfunction and injury. The root Latin here is "medicus," healing or making whole again. The language of medicine reveals the process is thought of in warlike terms: combat, struggle, defeat, fighting are commonplace. The functional understanding of medicine is struggle against an enemy. The nurse and the physician are primitive mother and father, nurturing children and protecting them from the enemy. The functional argument concludes the ethics are different. Compassion and support are fundamental virtues in nursing. Courage, authority and risk taking are those of medicine.

Important as these functions are, to insist that they are specially tied to nursing and medicine is to caricaturize, not characterize, these professions.

The recognition of the essential integration of healing and nurture has waxed and ...