Crossing the Bamboo Bridge
Community Topics of Interest
About
all about the bamboo bridge
The Bamboo Bridge (www.BambooBridge.org) is an international organization that seeks to achieve greater public access to a community’s primary healthcare resources by increasing cultural diplomacy between nurses and traditional healers and by creating research, information, and education opportunities that improve the cross-fertilisation and complementarity of traditional and biomedical health beliefs and systems. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 80% of the world's population continues to use their traditional methods of healing, including the use of medicinal plants (Farnsworth, Akerele, Bingel, Soejarto, & Guo, 1985). The World Health Organization defines "traditional" medicine or healing as the "ways of protecting and restoring health that existed before the arrival of modern medicine…approaches that have been handed down from generation to generation…and have met the needs of communities for centuries." (WHO Fact Sheet N 134). "Modern" medicine, also referred to as "western" or "biomedicine" is, historically speaking, a much younger system of health care and yet it has come to dominate the health care cultures of industrialized nations, such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The people of industrialized nations continue, just as in developing nations, to utilize their nation's, town's, and family's remedies for healing just as they explore the newer emerging diagnostic technologies, drugs, and biomedical therapeutics.
Nurses around the globe often receive their education in urban areas and/or facilities closely aligned with medical centers focused on the biomedical paradigm of healthcare. Therefore the professional culture of nurses is increasingly associated by the public as being aligned with the values, health beliefs and practices of medicine. Yet nurses have historically worked in rural communities and facilities that support populations that use traditional methods of healing such as herbal remedies, hydrotherapies, and spiritual ritual. Nurses, because of their societal roles often serve as "cultural diplomats" (Libster, Herbal Diplomats, 2004) for people as they navigate the "river" of historical and conventional recommendations and "evidence" when making health care decisions that reflect a full spectrum of health promotion to life saving behaviors. They need education, resources, and information about healing traditions for themselves and their patients (individuals, families, and communities).
In 2004, Dickenson-Hazard, Chief Executive Officer of Sigma Theta Tau, International Honor Society in Nursing, published the report of international Arista conferences in which multidisciplinary participants identified global needs for the future of health care and nurses' roles in achieving those goals. At all five Arista conferences, the most frequently cited "unique challenges" for nurses be able to meet global health needs of the future included "differing cultures, values, and beliefs requiring balance and integration of Western medicine and health care principles with more traditional approaches" (Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 2004).
The focus of the Bamboo Bridge Project is providing nurses educational support, resources and information for increasing the complementarity of their work with healing traditions found within a variety of socio-cultural contexts including those demonstrated throughout nursing history. Niels Bohr's concept of complementarity in quantum physics has been applied as, "A general principle to permit mutual understanding and respect among diverse cultures and allowing for the unity of human knowledge."(Grinnell et al, Bioethical Pluralism and Complementarity,2002). The Bamboo Bridge Project takes the concept of complementarity in health care, as the inclusion of historical, traditional, conventional, and biomedical paradigms and practices, and puts it into action for social change. Nurses can help to lead this integrative, pluralistic approach to the utilization of all health care resources. In 1985, the WHO executive board concluded that the role of nurses "would move from the hospital to everyday life in the community, that nurses would become resources to people, rather than to physicians, and that nurses would become leaders and managers of Primary Health Care teams, including supervising nonprofessional community health workers" (Barnes et al., 1995, p. 8). Resolution WHA44.34 of the 44th World Health Assembly urged member states (i.e., countries participating in WHO) to, "identify activities leading to cooperation between those providing traditional medicine and modern health care, respectively, especially in regards to the use of scientifically proven safe and effective traditional remedies to reduce national drug costs" (Baba, Akerele, & Kawaguchi, 1992, p. 65).
Nurses have centuries of experience as leaders and facilitators of the sharing of healing knowledge, wisdom, resources, and action. This experience however has not been cultivated as much as it might have been and therefore has not been developed to its fullest potential for strengthening global health. The Bamboo Bridge Project suggests greater opportunities for cross-fertilisation of knowledge and practice between nurses and traditional healers with a focus of achieving a greater understanding of situations in which the traditional and biomedical health care beliefs and practices have and can complement each other. Some historical scholars are beginning to study how pluralistic health care practices and policies have led to"hybridizing" and partnerships across diversity and division.
(http://www.wuhmo.ox.ac.uk/events/Hybrids%20Conference/hybrids_info.htm)
If you would like to learn more about Crossing the Bamboo Bridge: An Educational Project Exploring the Complementarity of Nursing and Healing Traditions email:
Bamboobridge@ecu.edu
Facilitator:
Dr. Martha Mathews Libster North Carolina, USA 1-252-744-6448