Health, Wellness, and Illness 1

Health, Wellness, and Illness Margo Schlichter University of New Hampshire

Health, Wellness, and Illness 2

Nursing Practice The ultimate goal of nursing is to promote both health and overall wellness in the patients that they treat. This should be done in a safe, positive, and effective manner. I think the most common belief is that nurses and other health care providers are meant to only treat a patients illness. An illness is something that causes a person to have an impaired physical, social, emotional, or intellectual well-being, most often from disease of the body or mind. This then causes a persons health and overall wellness to be diminished. I believe that health is a state of well-being that involves physical, mental, and social aspects needed to live a productive life. Wellness is a persons ability to reach an optimal state of well-being in all areas of life including physically, psychologically, socially, spiritually, and economically. The idea that nurses are meant to only treat a patients illness is incorrect, considering that illness is directly connected to a patients state of health and well-being. Therefore, nurses treat a patients illness in order to restore a patients health and overall wellness. I believe that these three concepts relate back to the idea of the science and the art of nursing. The science of nursing is a more concrete, stable way of treating a patients symptoms to alleviate an illness. Therefore, I believe the science of nursing refers more to a patients illness. I believe the art of nursing is a more abstract and dynamic approach to treat a patients health and overall wellness. The art of nursing allows you to realize not only a patients illness, but to treat it in a way that allows the patient to feel an overall sense of health and well-being. Treating not only a patients physical symptoms, but mental and emotional symptoms as well is what makes a patient experience an overall state of wellness. This is why the art of nursing is considered equally as important as the science of nursing. Without one, nurses would not be able to help patients achieve health and wellness through the absence of illness.

References

Damjanov, Ivan. Pathophysiology. Philadelphia: Saunders/Elsevier, 2009. 1-3. Print.

"WHO Definition of Health." Who.int. World Heath Organization, 2003. Web. 23 Oct. 2012. <http://www.who.int/about/definition/en/print.html>.