Nurses in alternative health care: Integrating medical paradigms

Judith Shuval*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

33 Scopus citations

Abstract

The article is concerned with nurses in Israel who incorporate alternative health care practices into their work, and considers strategies used by them to reconcile a variety of theoretical and practice traditions. The analysis utilizes boundary theory and focuses on the following boundaries: territorial, epistemological, authority, and social. In-depth narrative interviews were carried out in 2004 with 15 nurses who were working or recently worked in both biomedical and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) settings. The findings show that nurses using CAM practices do not seek to change the epistemological and authority boundaries of biomedicine. Even so many believe that CAM methods should be included within the cognitive boundaries of biomedicine. They are not disturbed that most of these techniques have not passed the test of biomedical research criteria, though they feel blocked by physicians who keep the cognitive boundaries of biomedicine closed.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1784-1795
Number of pages12
JournalSocial Science and Medicine
Volume63
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2006

Keywords

  • Alternative
  • Bio-medicine
  • Boundary
  • Complementary
  • Israel
  • Nurse

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Nurses in alternative health care: Integrating medical paradigms'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this