I’m pleased to introduce our last guest of the season, Dr. Barbara Dossey. Barbie, as she is known, is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the holistic nursing and nurse coaching movements – and she’s been at it since the 1960s. She’s a Florence Nightingale scholar, nurse theorist, a national and international speaker and teacher on the role of integrative nursing, and author or co-author of 25 books.
Healing versus Curing
You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ above, or on the following podcast platforms:
The following is a taste of my conversation with Barbie.
Q: Would you describe holistic and integrative nursing in layperson’s terms?
Barbie: It is about looking at all parts of ourselves. And when we focus on one and find balance there, what frequently happens then is the others begin to fall into place.
Q: What does healing mean to you?
Barbie: Healing involves every bit of ourselves, physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual. Healing is something that we are born with. No one can take it away from us. What we do though, is we close down our healing and we can open it up
Q: What were some of the strongest arguments against holistic care when you began in the 60s?
Barbie: There was a lot of opposition in the ’60s. The main thing people said is, “There’s no science behind it, you’re gonna kill people, and we just don’t have time to do it..”
When asked if there’s one last thing she’d like our listeners to hear, Barbie says, “Find time every single day to find harmony and balance. Take 15-20 minutes where you can sit and be still.”
About Barbara:
As an educator, consultant, researcher, and author, Barbara Dossey profoundly alters perceptions about holistic nursing. An inspired teacher, she effectively integrates non-traditional viewpoints with a high degree of scientific awareness in her lectures worldwide. Spanning the full range of current nursing and health information, her presentations provide challenging, practical, and innovative ways to combine holistic health care with high-level wellness. From nursing association gatherings to corporate meetings, all audiences respond enthusiastically to Barbara Dossey’s penetrating insights and abiding compassion. Her book, Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer, focuses on the philosophical and practical impact of Florence Nightingale’s life and work on modern nursing and humankind.
Find Barbara on Social Media:
https://dosseydossey.com/barbara/default.html (Website)
https://www.amazon.com/Barbara-Montgomery-Dossey/e/B00J63B47U/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1 (Amazon Author Page)
Barbara’s Books:
Nurse Coaching: Integrative Approaches for Health and Wellbeing
Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer
Holistic Nursing: A Handbook for Practice
Book Mentioned in the Interview:
Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Miissionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness, by Marlena Fiol, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
About Marlena Fiol:
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.
Find Marlena Fiol on Social Media:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn
Podcast Transcript:
Interviewer: Barbie, welcome. It’s a privilege to have you on the show.
Barbie: I am so happy to be here with you today.
Interviewer: So since most of our listeners are probably not nurses, would you begin by providing a brief overview of your life’s work, your mission, your vision of holistic and integrative nursing, but sort of in laypersons terms?
Barbie: Okay. I think one of the things that will help the listener is just when you feel like your life is really working and you feel that sense of wholeness, this is what it is. And so we could really just basically holistic is when we’re trying to deepen our understanding of that interconnectivity of our physical, our mental, our emotional, our social, and I put culture in there and in the environment. Those are words that all of us know. And frequently what happens when we get frustrated or overwhelmed, we’ll just think, “Oh, I would be feeling better if I just exercise,” or if I would quit eating somebody sweets or if I would get six or eight hours of sleep.
But the thing is all of those, yes, are bits and pieces of it. But it can allow us to take a deeper dive to go below the level of the service and really explore who we are. And so it is about looking at all parts of ourselves. And when we focus on one and find balance there, what frequently happens then is the others begin to fall into place.
Interviewer: Can you give an example of one coming into balance and the others falling into place?
Barbie: Yes. Well, we’re sitting right in the middle of COVID-19. We’re sitting in the center of Black Lives Matter not only in our communities but in our nation and in the world.
Interviewer: Yes.
Barbie: What arises…I will speak for myself. What arises every day is another level of what is a conversation and am I engaging? And it was very interesting is I was looking at a newspaper yesterday when I was checking out at the grocery store. And I looked at it and it was about all the statues of slavery and injustice and everything that’s going on right now. And this young man, he said, “Why are you interested in this?” And I said, “I believe that I do have some racism in me. There is no doubt about that. And I want to have conversations to help me open up and to understand what is within me even though I’ve done a lot of work.” And he said, “Well, you’re having a conversation with me. I’m a [inaudible 00:03:11] native of one of the pueblos here.” And he looked Caucasian.
And he said, “You don’t know my story and you don’t know my abuse.” And then he goes on and on. But what was interesting is he’s checking out because he doesn’t have to concentrate. He just has to scan what I’m doing. We had about a five-minute conversation and it was extraordinary. And right when I put my last sack in my cart, he said, “I want to tell you something.” He said, “I haven’t had a white woman talk to me like this.” And he said, “You act like you kind of know what healing is about.” And I said, “I’m going to tell you how much your conversation has meant to me today.” And I said, “Yes, we engaged in a healing conversation.”
And I’d love to just give an explanation or explore what I mean when I say healing. First of all, healing is something that we are born with. No one can take it away from us. What we do though is we close down our healing and we can open it up. So I see healing as it’s a life long journey. We know sooner than we’ve got all our little ducks in a row and there are no crises in the family or with our good friends, and all of a sudden everything just seems to fall apart. But then we have to go back again. And so I see healing as it’s a lifelong journey. It is allowing ourselves to find harmony, to find balance. And we know what it feels like when we have a sense of harmony and balance and it often is just what we can achieve just by simply taking a breath in and out.
And so when we say healing, it is also…it’s back to that holistic perspective that we mentioned to begin with. So when I say holistic, when I say healing, this involves every bit of ourselves, physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual, I also put in their culture, and I put environment. And we can say that healing really is little teeny tiny things that happen if we can find joy. Like this morning when I took a walk, the weather was just, ah, it was clear blue skies. The wind was blowing and it was a soft air and it was quiet. And there was just that joy and it filled my entire body. And so when I feel those feelings, I just always think, “This is going through my entire body.” I don’t even think about it. I allow myself to go to that deep place. So this is what healing is, it’s an emergent process.
And every time we can take a deep breath, when we can slow down a little bit, something happens where we then can go to that deeper level of our inner knowing and who we are. And that’s what leads us to a place of truth where we can integrate what it is that we would like to see happen. I also want to say too we put so much emphasis in this culture on curing, thinking that curing is healing. But they are two different things. Curing is alleviating signs and symptoms. The healing is what I was speaking about where all levels of our body feel a sense of that harmony and balance. And I think it’s also important to note that we’re all going to make a transition from this life. We’re all walking through at different stages and levels and years and so forth. But healing, I have seen it, as a practicing critical care nurse for 25 years, I have seen healing happen within families, within an individual at the last breath.
Interviewer: Yeah. And we’re going to talk some more about the end of life stage in a little bit. I’m very interested in going there. But before we do, you’ve lived your entire adult life as a healthcare pioneer. You’ve introduced aspects of holistic care way back in the ’60s and ’70s, long before it was an acceptable approach. It’s really not unlike my own parents who were pioneering Mennonite medical missionaries in Paraguay. My new book, “Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionaries’ Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness,” describes my journey as the daughter of pioneering giants. They revolutionized the treatment of leprosy when there was very strong opposition to their seemingly risky approach to it. So here’s my question. What were some of the strongest arguments against holistic care when you began? And then also, how did you respond to them?
Barbie: Right. There was a lot of opposition in the ’60s. The main thing people said is, “There’s no science behind it, you’re gonna kill people, and we just don’t have time to do it. It takes too much time.” So the main way that I was able to move forward, and I think this is what people do when they’re pioneers, they find like-minded people that are willing to journey with them. So as I was beginning to explore this, I found like-minded colleagues, a couple of them. We began to read articles, we began to read research that then was just very sporadic. We also began to attend a lot of workshops to get credentialed in different kinds of healing modalities like biofeedback, therapeutic touch, healing touch, relaxation imagery.
And in doing that, my worldview began to change. And at the critical care of the bedside, all the focus is on how fast you can work, the medicines you give, the treatments and the protocols knowing the physiology and the path of this. So once you do all of those, I am one of those people where I cannot compartmentalize myself. I never had been. It’s like leave yourself at the back door before you come into this critical care unit to work. I’m a person and I have a story. And I was blessed to have a daddy that was a storyteller. So I just love listening to people tell their story.
And what I found early on in my career is that if you ask a person at the very beginning of the day…I mean, you introduce, you do the vital signs, and this is what we together can accomplish in the next eight hours to get you better, to get you out of this unit. And I also want to know, what do you want to see happen? What can I do for you that is absolutely important right now? And it was usually something like, “I want to sit on the side of the bed for my breakfast.” And now they’ve been in bed for, say, five days. I said, “Man, this is a great, great goal. We can do this, and let me help you.” And then you just break it apart to see what’s going on. So little things like that.
So anyway, once I started learning these modalities, it became very clear to me how you weave them together. So, for example, in critical care, giving medications intravenously all day long, but this time when I learned how to do this, giving the same medication but then knowing that I am an instrument in the healing process, I’m half of that patient’s external environment, I said, “How can I use myself as a therapeutic part of this process?” And so to say to someone who is getting a pain medicine to be able to say, “I am getting ready to give you this medicine and it is going to be very effective because it is a very good medicine. And right now I am giving it as an intravenous slide and it is now entering your bloodstream. And what I’d like for you to do is to take a breath in and out and in and out.”
And another thing I also love to do anytime working in this realm is to get people to tell me about their pain, to describe it. “Where do you think…is it at the top of your scan? Is it right under your scan? Is it deep?” And then to get them to use their imagination. “So can you imagine…I’ve heard you describe pain going down your…” and of course, my nurse cardiology cap is to make sure this isn’t cardiac pain. And, “I’ve got it in my muscle, in my shoulder, in my neck. It’s going cross down to my stomach.” And a lot of that is just looking at it, not labeling or anything but as a nurse, I’m knowing this is part of anxiety, frustration, or it could be something else.
But then I would have them kind of gather up all that. “If you’ve got it down going to the leg, where would you like to put it? Let’s gather it all in your imagination in one place.” And they would frequently just say, “I’m gonna put it right here in my right hand.” And then I’d have them take all the pain that they’ve gotten their shoulder and stuff, put it in that left hand and do all that. And then to give that pain a size, shape, a color and texture. And then to find out from them, how would they like to let it go? And then doing this with their eyes closed.
And frequently what people will say they want to put it in the trash. They want to flush it. They want to take it out to the garbage can and now they can see the garbage truck coming, “Oh, my gosh,” they get engaged in it. And that’s what we have to remember. It’s part of the healing. It’s about our imagination. And imagery is literally, it is an interface between our body, mind, and spirit. And we can shift the story we tell ourselves. Because when you look at pain and suffering, the suffering is the story we place around whatever the dynamic is. And it’s body, mind, spirit, again, culture, environment.
Interviewer: Yep. So, Barbie…Oh, go ahead.
Barbie: No, I was just gonna say, imagery, it’s like a midwife. And so we can use our consciousness to begin to really shift to these deeper inner experiences then we begin to create the most…using all of our senses to hear, see, feel, touch, taste, in the [inaudible 00:14:59] aesthetic. And it literally is a strategy where we avert changes in our body, in our attitude, in our behaviors.
Interviewer: Yeah, absolutely. So, Barbie, giants in the service arena like yourself have usually had to doggedly focus on pursuing their vision and that often leaves little time for much else. Is there anything you especially miss not having done because of your focus on being a leader in your field?
Barbie: No. And the reason for that is I have always found like-minded soulmates and I realized I’m not in this alone. I mean, I’ve got this creative mind, I come up with all these big ideas. But, man, you put me with a couple of nurse colleagues, you know, men, women, you put us together and let us just kind of brainstorm where you just throw anything out there. Nobody is going to judge you for saying, “This is crazy. This will never work.” They’ll just say, “Come on, keep on going. What else can we do here?” And then we write a procedure or protocol. So I will say no. There are times I’ve been in several situations in my teaching and my clinical career where I had reached a dead end with that group of people I was working with and I bless them and I decided it was time to move on and do something different. That’s how I have…still at 77 having a great time at looking at all these other new things are just opening up like crazy.
Interviewer: That’s so wonderful. You have been a pioneer certainly, yes, but you’re also a visionary. I guess maybe the two often go hand in hand. They certainly did for my pioneering parents. You, Barbie, write about envisioning a culture of individual and collective health on a healthy planet. Really, I think of it as a shift in human consciousness. And I read in one of your articles that your central question was, “What will our world be in 2060?” That’s such a fantastically broad and challenging question. How do you answer that question today?
Barbie: I think the best way to answer that is to truly look at it from an integral perspective. Every single day we are being invited to have conversations, to look at our own shadow, to have conversations with people that we don’t normally, and listen to their story deeply. And so when I say an integral perspective, I am speaking about our individual interior. And so what I mean by that is I have to look at my own interiority. Who am I? What is my state of being? And by that, it is exploring my inner meaning. It’s about my inner world, what matters to me. And if it doesn’t matter, I’m not going to be doing it. Then I have to look at my thoughts and my feelings. I have to look at, am I coming from my values that I really believe in? What’s my intention of doing this?
And I also am very clear about…and this is really important about the healing is we do our healing and as we’re healing, sometimes we want to share it with people. And there are other things that we’re working through and we do not have to share that with people. When we choose what we will share, then what happens is we’re able to go to a deeper level. So part of healing in 2060 then is if I look at my own interiority, then I have to look at my external individual self. So what do I do? How do I live my life? So what are my body and actions in the world?
And these are things literally that are tangible. They’re measurable. So if I say I believe in eating live food, that means have vegetables cut, eat clean, yes. Or sometimes I eat packaged food but it’s as clean as I can get most of the time. And I feel that I have so much more energy. So if I’m going to talk about nutrition and I’m going to talk and explore integrative lifestyle, health, and wellbeing with colleagues and working in different kinds of dialogue groups, I need to be walking my talk. [inaudible 00:20:09] we look at healing and going out there to a healthy planet in 2060.
This next part is just absolutely key and this is our collective we space. So right now, you and I are in a we space. And just imagine what this would be like if we were sitting in circle in this we space. But here what we’re doing is we’re really looking at who we are together. What’s our story? What’s our conversation? And it’s about our relationships to each other and to groups. And what we do is we achieve…it’s not achieve but we create and we understand and we can mutually agree on how we relate to each other. And that’s key in healing what’s going on now. And then when we look at healing in 2060, it is about that external space, the external we space.
So it is about right now, which I’m involved in, is healthcare. How can we make our institutions? How can we move toward universal healthcare? And in 2020, International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife, which was designated by the World Health Organization, and this will continue through December 31st, 2020. And it was about how do we create a culture, this we culture externally demonstrating and designing things to make it work better? It’s about how can we create new procedures, new process where everybody has a voice, where we really can find the map that people want in their health and healing? How do we map it together to achieve that? And that’s what I’m hopeful for. So there are all these little things. Every little action is being done, before you know it, they all add up into a bigger piece.
Interviewer: Yeah. And I think the thing that is hard for some of us but very important to remember is that it begins with me. That each individual action is where it begins. It’s very easy for us to talk about collectives. I think it becomes more challenging when we point it to ourselves in our own individual actions. Right?
Barbie: Right. But what I’m seeing right now with Black Lives Matters, whatever the peaceful demonstrations that are out there, what people are doing is they’re looking for and exploring advocacy and safety and wellbeing. They’re engaging. They’re having different kinds of conversations, and they are engaged in ways that are going to contribute to decreasing this ongoing marginalization that we’re seeing of underprivileged. It’s just not okay anymore. I grew up in the segregated South. My high school was the first one to be integrated. Well, I was right there, I went to [inaudible 00:23:22]. It was Rock Central High School.
And it was very interesting growing up in the South. There were so many things that didn’t work where we had different restrooms for whites, for coloreds, for water fountains for everybody. My daddy was in the restaurant business. We had a small family restaurant business. And Daddy did employ Hispanic as well as black people in the restaurant. And we began to look at because we were having all of the…with demonstrations happening with black people coming in and sitting at counters and drugstores and stuff, and we just said, “Daddy, what will you do if…” and at that time it was… “a colored man will want to bring his family?” He said, “Well, I take y’all out to dinner. And if he wants to bring his family in here, he is going to be seated in our restaurant.” And we just went, “Daddy. Wow.” So that’s the kind of conversations that we had at our dinner table.
Interviewer: Yeah. So those were important early influences for you for sure.
Barbie: Yeah. So it’s really me look at having these conversations.
Interviewer: Yeah. One of the issues actually that we’re discussing during this season about service is that even service that seems to be well-meaning and coming from a loving heart can hide what we’re calling a savior complex or oppression. It seems to be motivated by the urge to help but may sometimes be an unhealthy avoidance of one’s own problems, it may even reflect privileged oppression. Have you seen that kind of savior complex show up in healthcare?
Barbie: Oh, absolutely. And what is essential is we recognize it. We have a conversation around it. And if we find that we’re being trapped and going there, what is absolutely essential is we name it and we began to have new behaviors. And one of the things that I find very useful is if we can create just basic rituals of healing. And when I speak about rituals, it is something that…So, let’s just look at it. Holidays. So what are the rituals around holidays? We grew up in our family of origin. There’s certain ways that Christmas was celebrated, birthdays, Thanksgiving. And now, here we are, we’re grown, we have our own families, our own friends, the family structure has changed. A lot of people don’t live near family. And we’re creating new rituals of healing.
And by a ritual, what I’m saying really is it’s how we act something that we believe to be true for ourselves that is about our values. And so let’s say one of the things that I find important for me is if I can get up 30 to 45 minutes before I have to have my first meeting or whatever my day is going to be, if I can weave into that time where I can have 20 to 30 minutes to sit quietly and to go deep and for me it is it’s just quieting the mind…you can’t quiet the mind. But what you do is you just watch it and then you let go and you take another breath. Here comes another thought and you keep on doing it.
But here’s what the deal is, is we live in a pace of life where we are revved up so much of the time. So if we can find and create the repetition of patterns where we slow down, this is what really helps us in the healing process. And so I think what I was also wanting to say there is I was speaking about traditional, which is our family of origin, holidays, birthdays, and Thanksgiving, Christmas, so forth. And so here we are now in our lives and what we have done is we have created self-generated rituals that don’t have any kind of history. We’re making them up. We’re designing them on the spot because they feel right.
And so when we take this time for ourselves, there is a quality that changes. Our mind becomes clearer. It is more free to wonder. And we can honor who we are. We honor the experiences of being alive. We tap into our soul’s level, our deepest souls level and it’s the invisible forces in our life. Whatever you want to call it. God, goddess, Allah, anything. It is how do we find something that is within us that it just brings light and energy and awareness?
Interviewer: I’m going to go back to something you mentioned earlier about that space at the end of life that I said we would get back to. The World Health Organization defines palliative care as “improving the quality of life of those facing life-threatening illness, relieving physical psychosocial and spiritual pain.” Barbie, that sounds pretty holistic to me. Is palliative care necessarily holistic and its approach?
Barbie: Yes, it is, if it’s done correctly. And it actually engages everything that I’ve been talking about right now. And a healthcare practitioner comes together with a patient, a client, and a family and friends, the significant others there to determine exactly what it is that one wants in their life. And I mentioned even I think in the very beginning when I was talking about healing is curing is giving all the medications, treatment, and other experimental and so forth. When you enter into palliative care, it is about comfort. At this point, people can decide whether they want to eat, whether they want to drink, and do whatever it is that they want to do. And this is, I think, one of the hardest things for families.
Interviewer: Yes, it is. Absolutely.
Barbie: Yeah, at the very end, people don’t want to eat, they don’t want to drink. And if you can just be with a family member, a loved one at that moment, and if they want to be touched, asking permission, a light touch on their hand, but some people don’t like to be touched at the end. You can hold the intention of healing and being in there in that space. And this is what happens in palliative care. It is when you use a conscious awareness is a healing intention to be in the present moment, to be in the present moment to truly facilitate the healing process. And I think another way to express this is it’s bearing witness. And bearing witness means that I am here for you and to bear witness to your suffering. And so we’re present for things just as they are. Yeah, go ahead.
Interviewer: Dr. Ira Byock, a renowned expert on palliative care, he’s also a guest on this podcast, he wrote the seminal book titled “Dying Well.”
Barbie: That’s right.
Interviewer: And he says something like, and I don’t have it in front of me, but the dying stage of life holds amazing possibilities. I know that you agree with that statement. My question to you is how do we harness those possibilities at a time when most people might think it’s the end of possibilities?
Barbie: Well, it is a time of expanding states of consciousness. And this physical body will die. But our mind, our consciousness is fundamental in the universe. And I do know that in our lifetime, we’re going to have many extraordinary studies, some will probably will get the Nobel Prize for looking at the connection of life form on the other side. [inaudible 00:32:37] so much data in there right now.
Interviewer: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve all heard the truism that we’re going to die as we have lived. So Ira Byock’s book has a number of cases, case studies that he presents. And among those studies, some patients died as they lived: anxious, upset, angry. Others changed in dramatic ways at the end of their lives. I’m wondering based on your experience, what do you think about how or if a person’s living shapes their dying?
Barbie: Well, it definitely does. But I have been around many people over, what, 55 years of nursing who can be angry and hostile and at the very end, the privilege of being there at a moment in time to bear witness to their suffering, to their anxiety and ask them just a simple question, “What is something that I can help you with right now?” And people often will say, “I just hope I can let go and die peacefully.” And then as a nurse to be able to facilitate that, “May I share with you a few things that can help you in your journey of peaceful dying?” And this is where I started out when I was talking about relaxation, meditation, prayer, and how I can bear witness to that person’s story. And it also…when I say bear witness, this is what’s important for each of us to do our own work where we understand those qualities of stillness. What is it? So to be there to be present for another.
Interviewer: Yeah. So I’m going to flip it from the end of life to beginning of life. As you mentioned, this is also the year of the midwife. Florence Nightingale was a strong proponent of home deliveries and the proper training of midwives. I know you know a lot about that being a Florence Nightingale scholar. It seems like in the past we moved away from the midwifery model and are now moving back toward it. Is that true? What drives these trends?
Barbie: It definitely is true. And I will say back to Florence Nightingale’s work, her applied statistics on home births versus birth by physicians in the 1860s to the 1880s is extraordinary. And before medicine discovered that a doc who would go from the morgue to go deliver a baby and the woman would die or be extremely ill, Florence was already writing about that 15 years before where they got it in medicine. What happened in our country is in the early 1900s, medicine declared that it was an illness.
Interviewer: Delivering a baby was an illness.
Barbie: Yeah, and it required a doctor to be present. What’s exciting right now is that midwifery is coming around. And many nurses, midwives have hospital privileges. They will try to deliver that baby at home or they can go to a birthing room in a hospital. But a woman who is having no problems, she can literally go to either a birthing room or in her home and never see a physician, but midwives all partner and they have good relationships with obstetricians.
Interviewer: Yeah, yeah. Speaking of trends, the healthcare system in the U.S. has changed so much during the past several decades. In your opinion, have those changes impacted patient care in a positive way?
Barbie: No. The main thing that’s happened is in our country, healthcare has been turned into a business and profit. But the things that have worked there is the work that my husband and I have been engaged with, with many like-minded people, is the conversation that started with, in the early ’60s, alternative therapies then began to be called complimentary and alternative now are integrative modalities. And these are like the relaxation imagery, biofeedback, meditation, healing touch, what we’re seeing with HeartMath and so many other areas. So we know exactly what has not worked but we can certainly see the things that have worked.
What I’m excited about is the conversation now is shifting to health and wellbeing here in our country that will also go along with the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals is we have for the…I guess we’re going into the 20th year of the United States looking at healthy people. And the agenda now goes out to 2030. And you can go on the web and find enormous amount of information. Any kind of project that you’re working on, try to tie it with a healthy nation, USA, and it then ties into the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Interviewer: Yes. So there are some 20 million nurses in the world and 2 million midwives. I think I read that statistic, those statistics. And the World Health Organization last year stated, “The world needs 18 million more health workers to achieve and sustain universal health coverage by 2030.” Do you agree?
Barbie: Oh, absolutely.
Interviewer: So why the shortage?
Barbie: The shortage has to do with many of the factors where we have not gone into the right educational stream. We’ve cut back. We’ve put more money in procedures and technology. We have nurses that don’t stay in the profession as long as…like me. I can’t imagine anything I would have wanted to do with my life. I’ve been in nursing 55 years and still thrilled with it. But young nurses today can be disenchanted. And so what we have to do is partner and I’m beginning to see these enormous changes with partnerships. Our academic programs are truly integrating health and wellbeing for the nurse as he or she begins their education.
Interviewer: Yeah, yeah. So do you see the need being filled? Do you see us moving toward the goals of the coverage we need?
Barbie: Yes, I definitely do. And one of the reasons that that is going to happen, we have the World Health Organization just did a state of nursing report that came out in 2020. And the midwifery report will be out in 2021. And they are guidelines for increasing and meeting those many more people to fill the role of nurse and midwife. It will happen. And I think also we’re beginning to see structures begin to change. And what people really need right now is not a five-minute visit with a doc. How do they truly look at an integrative lifestyle of health and wellbeing and those factors?
I am so excited to begin to see the many different kinds of dialogue groups around nutrition, around health, around stress management. And these are things that can be accomplished with nurses co-facilitating. So in these situations, nurses don’t teach, they can give handouts and stuff, but it is bringing people together to tell their story about what’s worked and what’s not worked in trying to change something about lifestyle.
Interviewer: Yes, yes. A really quick personal anecdote about the increased awareness of…today, the increased awareness of healing and nutrition and healthful living. My grandsons were over for dinner the other night and I brought out a bunch of popsicles for dessert. And our 9-year-old grandson looks at me and says, “Noni, those have too much sugar in them.” I can’t even imagine when I was 9 years old that I would have any concept of that. And I was really encouraged by it. It’s like even our little kids are thinking about things like that. In the midst of all of the negative and the pain and all of the chaos around us, there are some encouraging signs.
Barbie: Well, I think you’re absolutely right. I’ll just look in one of my family with the young kids to a niece and nephew that are, well, almost 14 and then their 11-year-old brother. And they have always been around health and now they’re growing vegetables. They’ve got it in all the gardens around the house. They now have decided they’re doing chickens. They’ve got all kinds of pets. But it is so interesting to look at where they are about exercise, about health and wellbeing, but most important, where I was going that when I thought of that is they do not say the color of people’s skin.
They are in integrated schools and they are having those conversations. They’re in different cultures and homes with different religions and the conversations and particularly their awareness of world religions and where does it fit in with Christianity and the commonalities and the differences and what are the major threads? It’s fascinating. And we’re blessed with this internet. Yes, sometimes it can be a curse. But for the most part, let’s look at really what it can do. Anytime we want to search something, we can go get some information. Now, we can also get bad advice on that.
Interviewer: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, no, but what you’re saying is true. And I think it’s wonderful that in our conversation we can end with really signs that show…there are signs that we are moving in the right direction. With all of the hiccups and the backward moves, there are still reasons to be very optimistic and I love that. Barbie, you’ve been the sole recipient of too many awards for me to begin to name them all. You’ve also received prestigious awards together with your husband, Larry Dossey, who has been a healthcare pioneer in his own right. He was one of my guests in season one of this podcast. When we hear about power couples like the two of you, both of you in the healthcare field, a natural question that arises is the extent to which and how you drew inspiration and ideas and courage from each other over the course of all of the decades together. Would you comment on that?
Barbie: Well, I tell you what, we were blessed that the universe had us working in the same hospital on the same unit. I met Larry his last month in medical school in 1967. And as they say, the rest is history. But what is so…
Interviewer: No, we want more than that.
Barbie: What’s exciting about it is Larry has a gigantic mind. So do I. Our styles are completely different. But what we have done is we listen to each other’s stories. We listen to the frustration and the stress. We take time almost every day. What did you write today? Are you ready to read it to me? And so many a night, Larry will read to me but I’ll say, “Okay, let me get my needle point.” And so I’ll start. And he will read to me and I don’t interrupt him. But I’ve got my paper and pencil there and I’m taking notes about what I’d like to hear different or what didn’t make sense to me. So we’ve done that all our lives.
I can remember early on in the ’60s, when I was beginning to do a lot of complementary and alternative therapies when there were no certificates for nurses where no protocols had been written. And Larry was on medical staff at this one hospital. He said, “You’re getting ready to get fired.” And he said, “I can’t do a thing about it.” And he said, “What are you going to do about it?” And I said, “Well, guess what? Tomorrow I will go out and I’m going to have lunch with a couple of friends. And we’re going to start writing some protocols and we’re going to put it in paper and pencil.” And back then it was longhand. You wrote it out and then you would give it to someone to type for you. So it just started out there.
But that’s been so important is yes, we have achieved a lot, but it has not been easy. And we both have had like-minded colleagues that are big thinkers that are willing to travel in this territory with us. And I think that’s the one thing I would love to just say to people who have listened to our conversation here is if you do not have a soulmate who loves you unconditionally, it doesn’t have to be a husband or wife but someone who loves you unconditionally who will listen to you tell your story, who won’t say, “You’re crazy, it will never work,” but will listen, that is absolutely key in staying steady.
Interviewer: So, Barbie, I was going to ask you just now as we approach the end of our conversation if there was one last thing you’d like our listeners to hear. Is this what you just said?
Barbie: Yes, I think that is definitely it. And I would also say at the very beginning when you were asking me what holistic is and I spoke about harmony and balance, find time every single day, 15, 20 minutes where you can sit and be quiet and still. And now that we’re in summertime, find a place that is cool where you can get out in nature a little bit and focus on what is going right. Because when we focus on what’s going right, we’re tapping into our strengths. When we tap into our strengths then those things that are not working, we use our strengths to begin to give us a new way to address our challenges.
Interviewer: Yes, thank you. This has been such a meaningful conversation. Barbie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.
Barbie: Oh, great. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Interviewer: Thank you.