The link between Ayurveda and modern nursing

While clearing out old paperwork last week, I came across a reflective assignment I'd written for one of my Nursing Diploma modules 13 years ago. Any nurse reading this will know how much reflective writing we had to do as nursing students and continue to do as registered nurses. At the time, I'd cringe at the idea of having to write reflective pieces but as time has gone on, I've learnt it's been a useful skill to have for all areas of life. Not necessarily writing everything down using the Gibbs model, but just in your head. It affects your thought process. It makes you stop, take a step back and really think about your own responses in situations.

Anyway, this assignment was about some research I'd done on complementary medicine, specifically Ayurvedic medicine, and it's application to nursing practice. I saw a parallel between many of the foundational principles and features of Ayurveda and the holistic nature of nursing and felt we should be adopting more of this knowledge into the nursing curriculum.

The marker didn't share my enthusiasm though, writing "Is this a thing?" I finished my course and the idea was shelved or forgotten about as I dived into the real world of nursing which itself is a non-stop learning process. The number of people you interview, listen to, care for, reassure, teach, encourage, discourage, means you never feel like a master of your trade because when you work with people, certainty and predictability go out the window. Everyone is different and comes with a different story. But this is what has made it the most interesting work I've ever done. As nurses, we have the privilege of accessing the lives of others and seeing how they they do things. This is a massive insight into human nature both collectively and individually.

As a Community Nurse, especially, you're often working on someone else's turf - the person's own home, their hostel room, their space. You get to see their environment, their friends and family, they're functional ability, they're coping mechanisms or lack of.

Reading the assignment I'd written as a naïve nursing student all those years ago, I can see my thought process. It was all about nursing tasks in the hospital setting and how a patient’s stay could be enhanced by adding components from Ayurveda such as food choices, physical activity and so on.

Having been a nurse practitioner in the community for over a decade, I can now appreciate much more how the holistic approach is the only approach that works in nursing. We can't isolate people from their environments or relationships and dictate what they do

Then two years ago I enrolled on an Ayurvedic Health & Wellbeing Practitioner diploma course and my definition of what it means to be holistic changed and expanded once again. Ayurveda teaches us that we are a part of nature and so as our natural surroundings (including seasons, people, food) shift and change, so do we. We are physically and emotionally affected by every quality we come into contact with. With this in mind, it's impossible to understand and treat someone without taking into account their surroundings, their people, their values, and their tendencies (what is known as Prakirti in Ayurveda).

With hindsight, I can see that I was ignorant about the depth of Ayurveda as I was ignorant about the depth of nursing. Both share an approach to health that focuses on healing rather than the medical approach of fixing. Returning to Ayurveda and the complementary health field in general after spending some solid time in nursing learning about the challenges and skillset needed to really hear your clients and their needs, now feels like the right time. The combining of old and new just makes sense – it’s not a matter of one versus the other. Traditional wisdom and modern methods can really be used in a truly complementary way (with a bit of tweaking of the healthcare model – longer appointment times should be a non-negotiable for starters).

And what was just a curiosity initially and something that didn't exist according to academics, now 13 years later, I've created into a role of my own. I'm an Advanced Nurse Practitioner AND an Ayurvedic Health & Wellbeing Practitioner! This shows that what we have in mind doesn't always come ready-made. Sometimes we need to create the thing we want to do.