MCN Am J Matern Child Nurs. 1998 Jul-Aug; 23(4): 210-5.

Caring and healing in the 21st century.

Ward SL.

Nebraska Methodist College of Nursing and Allied Health, Omaha 68135, USA.

As the 21st century approaches, nurses must be prepared to offer new treatment methods when caring for children. The purpose of this article is to familiarize nurses with human caring theory and complementary and alternative medicine, and to offer a practical way of integrating these methods into nursing care. Nurses can learn to choose simple, conservative, noninvasive, nonintrusive healing methods that are met with little resistance by other health care professionals. Clinical implications of the Nurse's Tool Box suggest methods such as drawing, acupressure, guided imagery, storytelling, therapeutic touch, soft music, and humor as ways to help children heal. By tapping into certain frequency currents through the use of these tools, nurses may build, repattern, or facilitate human energies to replenish children's minds, bodies, and souls, creating wholeness and harmony. By understanding human caring theory and complementary and alternative medicine, and by using a practical approach to healing, nurses in the new century can mend children in ways they never have before.