ABSTRACT
This chapter it. based on a phenomenological study undertaken of a PhD in nursing at Massey university in New Zealand. The aim of the original research was describe the phenomenon of clinically inflicted pain-pain that is created in the process of nursing interventions.Such pain differs from pathological pain of disease or trauma since it has an external referent. It thus involves at least two persons; the one whose actions generate the pain, and the patient who must endure it.As described elsewhere (Madjar 1991; 1998)the study involved fourteen patients who bad experienced burn injuries and who underwent dressing changes and other procedures in a burn care unit ,or who were diagnosed with cancer and received intravenous chemotherapy in an oncology clinic. The study also included twenty nurses who nurses who provided direct care to these patients. In this chapter the focus is on on one aspect the original study-the discussion of how nurses working in a burn care unit experienced the challenge of inflicting and releiving pain in the course of their everyday work. This chapter is dedicated to the twenty nurses who allowed a researcher’s gaze to be cast over their work and who teach us all that even among the pain there are possibilities for understanding, care and therapeutic partnership
IN HIS CHAPTER earlier in this book, Max van Manen writes about the complementary natures of the gnostic act and the pathic hand, as well as the ambiguity between the pathic and gnostic touch employed in nursing practice. Nowhere is the tension between the two forms of touch more evident than in nursing acts that, regardless of the intent, involve the infliction of pain. Even conceptually it is not easy to distinguish between the ‘gnostic’ and the ‘pathic’, the technical and the empathetic, the ‘instrumental’ and the ‘therapeutic’ (Gadow 1984). In actual practice the similarities and the distinctions are not so much thought of as lived-sometimes with considerable difficulty for both those who inflict pain and those who must endure it.
