Integrative Health An Overview for Nursing Practice.

Conventional Western medicine is considered a mainstream approach to healthcare, whereas non-mainstream approaches have included complementary and alternative medicine, referred to as CAM. Today, integrative medicine combines complementary and conventional approaches to care. This article describes terminology and features of complementary, alternative, and integrative methods, and the newer field of integrative nursing.

Healing through prayer: a qualitative study.

A qualitative study using a semistructured interview process explored the experience of being healed through prayer in 20 participants from several Protestant Christian faith traditions. Five cluster themes and their subthemes were identified, such as Spirituality and Suffering (subthemes of Purpose of Suffering and Spiritual Meaning of Suffering); The Healing Experience (subthemes of Problems that Were Healed, Incomplete Healings or Recurrences, and Healing of Friends and Family Members); The Connecting Network of Prayer (subthemes of Connection to God, Connection to Others, Meaning of Prayer, Methods of Prayer, and Unanswered Prayer); Spiritual Transformation of Prayer (subthemes of Changed Lives and Sense of Purpose); and Spiritual Phenomena (subthemes of Sense of God's Presence, Use of Complementary and Alternative Practices, and Mysterious Phenomena).

The influence of a spirituality-based intervention on quality of life, depression, and anxiety in community-dwelling adults with cardiovascular disease: a pilot study.

Purpose And Design: The specific aims of this pre-experimental pilot study were to determine the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of an individualized spirituality-based intervention on health-related outcomes (quality-of-life [QOL], depression, and anxiety) in community-dwelling patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD).

Methods: Self-reported QOL, depression, and anxiety data were provided by cardiac patients recruited from three community-based organizations, ( N = 27) at baseline and one month later. The Spirituality Scale developed by the principal investigator assessed study participants' level of spirituality and scoring on the subscales activated one or more of three spirituality-based interventions.