What exactly is Western society nursing culture? I have seen a lot of information regarding non-western culture but what about Western society culture and the nurses role there.

-- Stephen Dietrich (drdeech@earthlink.net), October 28, 2001

Answers

Stephen, Before we can understand others we must be able to look at ourselves and see our own biases, beliefs, understand both our own world views and those of our patients. Western medicine by its nature treats patients as medical objects, a biomechanical entity. Patients are detached from their own lives and life stories and physically taken from their home settings into the unfamiliar setting of a hospital, to be treated by different specialists. In a world as complex as ours, each of us is shaped by many factors, and culture is one of the powerful forces that acts on us. Anthropologists Kevin Avruch and Peter Black explain the importance of culture this way: ...One's own culture provides the "lens" through which we view the world; the "logic"... by which we order it; the "grammar" ... by which it makes sense. (Avruch and Black, 1993) In other words, culture influences what we see, how we make sense of what we see, and how we express ourselves. All things that are done in a social group: marriage, ritual, religion, literature, science, are cultural practices. They occur only because that social group has a certain world view, this means that you can derive a world view from anything within a cultural group.

For more information on the western medical culture, rituals, beliefs and customs see -Provider Culture www.culturediversity.org/provc.htm

Víctor

-- Victor (victor@culturediversity.org), November 07, 2001.