This year, 2010, we celebrate the International Year of the Nurse to commemorate Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing who died in 1910. We believe that Ms Nightingale, an advocate of health, self-healing, and healthy environments, would be proud of the strides that nurses have made to promote holistic health and care around the world. In honor of the Year of the Nurse, the Editors of Holistic Nursing Practice (HNP) and Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine (ATHM) have collaborated on their fall issues to highlight the cutting-edge contributions of nurses who work from holistic frameworks. The readers of HNP and ATHM will receive the fall issue of both journals and will have access to the fall issues through each journal's Web site. Nightingale would have approved given her lifelong quest to understand the scientific underpinnings of health and illness and the statistical evidence on the efficacy of good nursing care.
Several themes in this age of health care reform resonate not only with Nightingale's vision for healthier societies but also with the philosophies of HNP and ATHM. First, individuals need to take charge of their own health: eating healthy foods, engaging in regular physical activity, avoiding risky behaviors like smoking, monitoring the parameters of health, and making lifestyle changes that will prevent chronic illness or keep it in check. Nightingale believed that "health nursing" and cultivating good health were equally important to "sick nursing," the art and principles of which she developed almost single-handedly. Prevention superceded cure in Nightingale's schema as she advocated for Health Missioners to work, first in the villages of rural India and then in England, teaching women how to prevent disease and maintain healthy environments.1
In Nightingale's era, the burden of illness was related to infectious and acute diseases; thus, her emphasis was on hygiene. Today, the burden of illness has shifted to chronic illnesses related to lifestyle: diabetes, coronary artery disease, asthma, and depression. Putting the individual in the best condition for nature to act in a healing way was Nightingale's credo and it was never more applicable than today. The authors who have contributed to the fall issues of HNP and ATHM are advocates for a holistic perspective, for self-care strategies and alternative/integrative modalities to improve health, prevent illness, and empower health care providers to collaborate on the reinvention of the health care system. It is our hope that introducing the readers of HNP and ATHM to both journals will encourage the proliferation of our shared holistic practices and perspective.
Gloria F. Donnelly, PhD, RN, FAAN
Editor-in-Chief
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