So you want to be a nurse? My nursing experience. Modern medicine. Good or bad?

Sad to say, but i have spent rather too much of my 37 years not thinking sufficiently about many things. For the first 25 or so years i was thoughtless about God and my standing before Him. Other ‘thinking’ i did was in the majority formed by educational institutions, which had i ‘actually’ thought at all i would have deemed to be dangerous places for a young mind and escaped out the back door into the land of ‘free thinking’ where other dangers lurk.

One of those educational institutions was the nursing program i undertook as a 17 year old. I would suggest that at the time i studied nursing, things were most certainly not as bad as they are today (most especially in the USA but also to an ever increasing degree in the UK, and of the course the only difference between these two countries is where the money comes from, not some greater level of ethics from UK leaders). I was at least reminded in my training that nurses (and doctors) were to “do the patient no harm” and that in treating the patient we must consider them from a holistic perspective. The knowledge of human anatomy and physiology was not wasted or incorrect but ultimately the more i progressed in nursing, the less this actually played any major part in what i did each and every day. The true study of human health is both more simple than modern medicine would have all lay people to believe and also far more complex than most doctors and nurses stop to consider. After spending 15 years in both NHS hospitals and also a 3 year spell in private UK health care, i grew increasingly disillusioned with pretty much everything i was doing.

After i qualified as a registered nurse i landed my first job on a acute medical/hematology ward. This just happened to be where a job was available and so i took it. Thus began my career in hematology and oncology. Even in those first three years as a very junior nurse i was starting to grow somewhat dubious about whether we ‘medical’ folks were truly helping anybody and even more concerned that we may actually be doing the exact opposite. We may be harming those who entrusted their own lives and the lives of those they loved to us who were counted as the ‘professionals’.

However, at this time the ‘thinking’ part of my brain was rather crowded out by a life of partying and numbing of ‘senses’ (due to my thoughtlessness regarding my Maker) and so i continued to live as the (for the greater part) unthinking masses. Please understand, when i say ‘thinking’ i am not in any way speaking about ‘education’. Many many people are highly educated and yet rarely think. The two most certainly do not go hand in hand.

I left the medical ward to work in the private sector as an intravenous specialist nurse. This was a community job, wherein i provided intravenous chemotherapy (this was the majority of the work) to patients in their own homes. This gave me a wonderful insight into patients as real live people with families and homes and jobs and daily struggles etc. Nursing people in hospital inevitably removes a great deal of the ‘person’ from the patient and the busyness (often useless busyness) of hospital wards prevents nurses from having the time to sit with each patient and truly ‘learn’ who they are. Looking back it is quite incredulous to me to consider that i nursed so many people whom i had such a scant knowledge of and yet believed this was ‘holistic’ nursing care. For three years i drove the length and breadth of northern England to deliver this ‘high tech’ specialist treatment which supposedly was saving lives. I enjoyed that job, mostly because it gave me the opportunity to develop relationships with the patients in far more beneficial ways than was ever really possible in a hospital setting. The doubts continued though.

This job led me back into the hospital setting and an NHS setting once again. I became the Hematology Specialist Nurse at a teaching hospital in the north of England. This job had three main dimensions to it. Primarily i took charge of the out patient day unit where patients came for chemotherapy, blood and platelet transfusions and pretty much any other intravenous treatment which could be ‘safely’ administered without requiring hospitalization. Secondly i was specialist practitioner for all new patients with malignant disease. This was both in patients and out patients. I saw them at diagnosis and followed them throughout the trajectory of their illness. Many to their death. Finally, i had tagged onto my job the position of bleeding disorders specialist nurse. This saw me overseeing children and adults with hemophilia and many other rare and fascinating bleeding disorders. I learned on my feet so far as that was concerned.

Again i truly did enjoy this work. The position i was in gave me a greater ability to spend time with each patient and seek to provide true holistic care (holistic as i still believed this to be). Equally, being in this senior position opened up avenues to work alongside many more people than doctors and nurses alone. I got to know some of the inside info of drug companies for example. The reps were continually seeking me out for an interview with the objective of bragging about their drugs in the hope that i would use theirs over other drug companies. I learned that in these matters, the primary concern had to be cost and supply. I began to understand that in order to keep a hospital running smoothly, it was unwise to put all your eggs in one basket. In other words, use a good few drug companies so that if one runs into trouble, you still have plenty of supply from the others. This makes sense of course but when patients are given a drug, they hardly expect it to have been chosen based on this kind of decision making. There are far more dubious reasons than this for choosing drugs of course. Mostly it boils down to whose pockets require lining. Drug companies are rich. So rich they pay reps to basically spend their days giving away phones and laptops and paying for fancy conferences and nights out etc. (I confess i enjoyed trips to Paris, India and Spain thanks to rich drug companies!) And all this from the luxurious comfort of mercedes benz cars. Please understand i have no problem with people driving around in luxurious cars. Far from it. I am about as far from being a socialist as could be. However, when these luxuries are gained at the expense of a nations health it becomes an ethical issue more than a social one. For the record, i never met a drug rep whom i did not get along with and have a degree of respect for. This is not a slur on those people or the job per sae.

Lastly, in this job, i was party to meetings between high ranking doctors and as such began to understand more and more just how little confidence doctors often have in the treatments they are daily prescribing for their patients. And in actual fact, many times the more senior the doctors were, the less confidence they had in them and the more they questioned their own profession. Yet, these doctors never questioned their practice sufficiently to alter it in anyway. (There are of course those who did alter their practice but in the main these brave people were looked down upon by their former colleagues and written off as ‘quacks’.)

I left nursing having met and married my first husband. I met John in the hospital. He was a patient. The two years which we had together pretty much affirmed to me the dangers of modern medicine and the arrogance of many who work within it. Doctors can be truly lovely people. They can even have wonderful bedside manners. This is, until you as the patient or the patients relative, begin to seriously question what they are doing. At that point they ‘can’ become rude and almost oppressive. Looking back at the time John and I spent with doctors and nurses (myself being on the other side of it all for this period) i stand amazed at just how different medicine is practiced to virtually any other profession you could think of. Were i to go to a lawyer today for some advise on a legal matter, i doubt i would have to sign a form in the presence of witnesses, should i choose to refuse their counsel. Yet John had to sign declarations stating that he was going ‘against medical advice’ numerous times simply because he wished to go home (where there were no sick people to catch infections from) and had presumed that he was not a ‘prisoner’ and as such had the liberty to come and go as he chose. Not so! Entering a hospital is a far easier activity than leaving one. ;)

Florence Nightingales motto was “to do the patient no harm”

The hippocratic oath (as bizarre as it originally was) stated a similar thing. “Never do harm”.

For the majority of my nursing career i most certainly DID do the patients an awful lot of harm. And the harm i did was all dutifully prescribed by doctors.

For the most part people who choose to be ‘treated’ for disease by modern medicine are choosing a decreased quality of living and a far more painful and oftentimes lengthy dying. Having children i am highly motivated to understand good health and how to maintain it until death. I desire for them to live well and to die well and i do not believe those things are out of our reach.

Adolf Hitler, just like many other tyrants and despots, succeeded in slaughtering so many innocents based purely on a people who either turned a blind eye to a truth they were aware of, or simply did not think for themselves. Modern medicine (including a lot of surgeries) does untold harm every single day without ‘just cause’. If you are considering a career in nursing or medicine why not do your research first? Check out natural healing methods. Take a good look at exactly what you are going to be ‘taught’ and ‘trained’ in as a nurse/doctor. How much true freedom will you have when you graduate? Will you merely be bound by government protocols and pressure from insurance companies or drug reps? Why do you want to be a nurse/doctor? What is your primary objective? Spend time observing nurses and doctors in various specialities and ask lots of questions. Pick some common prescription drugs and research them. Do you like the answers you got? Spend some time with alternative practitioners also. Research patient compliance with both modern western medicine and alternatives. What do you know about food and health? Make it your job to know these things. Remember that as a nurse you will have very little power to direct the course of a patients treatment (especially in your junior years). Are you content to administer all the many drugs that doctors will prescribe, even if you know they are causing your patient serious harm? Think of three or four common illnesses people are usually hospitalized for and compare hospital treatment and outcomes with natural treatments and outcomes. What is more important to you? Quality of life and death or quantity of life and so called ‘prevention’ of death? Use these questions to think of at least ten more questions to research before deciding upon nursing or medicine as a career.

I am not comparing medicine with Hitler. Only the apathy of so many of us who blindly put our trust in medicine and all that it entails without serious thinking. Neither am i saying that ‘all’ modern medicine is bad. But it is getting harder and harder to sift out the good from the bad. 

I hope to write other hubs discussing the importance of diet and health along with some specific illnesses and their modern treatments and natural alternatives. Areas of special interest to me are cancer (including leukemia), pregnancy and childbirth, sugar as a toxin, breastfeeding, vaccinations and childhood diseases.