My goal as a registered nurse is to create an environment that would allow patient's an option to have complementary treatments such as, relaxation, touch, imagery, and hypnotherapy techniques available to them pre and postoperatively. By doing this it would form a partnership with the patient and together be able to participate in their healing process.

This would expand the nursing process by being able to treat the patient as a whole rather that a disease process. Research shows that the combination of relaxation techniques, imagery and hypnotherapy have value to the perioperative patient both in the adult and pediatric population. The Journal of PeriAnesthesia Nursing (2003)p.254-261 looked at the effect of two nursing interventions; guided imagery and music therapy on the postoperative outcomes with laparoscopic surgery patients, this showed the patients who used them had much less pain on discharge than the controlled group.www.aspan.org/publication_tips_for_your_resear.htm

Using Wikipedia, the free encycopedia,www.wikipedia.org is a great website for descriptions and definations of the different types of complementary therapies.

The association of Operating Room Nurses (AORN) article (1997) p. 644-9 "Guided imagery as a coping strategy for perioperative patients." showed with the use guided imagery patients experienced less pre and postoperative anxiety, pain, and required almost 50% less pain medication after their procedure than the controlled group.mailto:group.aornjournal@aorn.org

The pediatric population are excellent subjects for complementary therapies, such as hypnotherapy, and visual imagery for management of their surgical procedures. Children live in a wonderful world of wonderment and imagination which would be a benefit to a health care worker. An article from Nurse Week,(2004) p.1 by Janet Kilgore. "No More Tears" demonstrated that there was a reduction in children's postoperative pain and anxiety with the use of medicine and imagery tools such as videos, audiotapes, relaxation, and imagery techniques pre and postoperative.http://www.nurseweek.com/news/features/04-11/painmgmtprogram.asp

Combination is the key word here to be able to combine complementary therapies and traditional medicine would be a better way to serve our patient population. Not only reducing pain, anxiety we would be empowering ourselves and our patients to participate in their healing process and giving them the tools to develop a sense of well being. Your comments are appreciated as I move forward in my learning process.