Pattern recognition as a caring partnership in families with cancer.

Pattern recognition as a caring partnership in families with cancer The purpose of this study was to address the process of a caring partnership by elaborating pattern recognition as nursing intervention with families with cancer. It is based on Newman's theory of health as expanding consciousness within the unitary-transformative paradigm and is an extension of a previous study of Japanese women with ovarian cancer. A hermeneutic, dialectic method was used to engage 10 Japanese families in which the wife-mothers were hospitalized because of cancer diagnosis. The family included at least the woman with cancer and her primary caregiver. Each of four nurse-researchers entered into partnership with a different family and conducted three interviews with each family. The participants were asked to describe the meaningful persons and events in their family history. The family's story was transmuted into a diagram of sequential patterns of interactional configurations and shared with the family at the second meeting. Evidence of pattern recognition and insight into the meaning of the family pattern were identified further in the remaining meetings. The data revealed five dimensions of a transformative process. Most families found meaning in their patterns and made a shift from separated individuals within the family to trustful caring relationships. One-third of them went through this process within two interviews. The families showed increasing openness, connectedness and trustfulness in caring relationships. In partnership with the family, each nurse-researcher grasped the pattern of the family as a whole and experienced the meaning of caring. Pattern recognition as nursing intervention was a meaning-making transforming process in the family-nurse partnership.

Antioxidative activity of tetrahydrocurcuminoids.

In order to develop a new type of antioxidative compound which has both the phenolic and beta-diketone moiety in the same molecule, we converted three known curcuminoids, curcumin (diferuloylmethane, U1), (4-hydroxy-3-methoxycinnamoyl)methane (U2), and bis-(4-hydroxycinnamoyl)methane (U3), which are the natural antioxidants of Curcuma longa L. (tumeric), to tetrahydrocurcuminoids (THU1, THU2, and THU3, respectively) by hydrogenation, and evaluated their antioxidative activity by using linoleic acid as the substrate in an ethanol/water system. Further, we used the rabbit erythrocyte membrane ghost and rat liver microsome as in vitro systems and determined the antioxidative activity of these curcuminoids. When we evaluated their antioxidative activity by these assays, it was found that THU1 had the strongest antioxidative activity among all curcuminoids in each assay system. THU1 has been reported to be one of the main metabolites of U1 in vivo [Holder et al., Xenobiotica, 8, 761-768 (1978)]. These results suggest that THU1 must play an important role in the antioxidative mechanism of U1 in vivo by converting U1 into THU1.

Patient-nurse collaboration: a comparison of patients' and nurses' attitudes in Finland, Japan, Norway, and the U.S.A.

While there has been an increasing emphasis on patients' participation in decisions concerning health care and nursing in the literature as an ideal, it is not clear to what extent patients and nurses assume the consumerist attitude regarding health-care decision making. With the view that attitudes people hold regarding their role in health care and nursing will primarily affect the way they behave in health-care situations, a multinational study was carried out to examine five sets of attitudes regarding consumerism held by patients in acute-care hospitals and nurses working in them. The findings from the surveys in Finland, Japan, Norway, and the U.S.A. indicate that while the patients and the nurses in these countries tend to lean toward the consumerist perspective in their attitudes, there were significant differences in the acculturation of these attitudes among the countries and between the patients and nurses. Two different models for the explanation of attitude regarding collaborative decision making in nursing practice emerged for the patients and the nurses as groups. For both groups, however, age and the more general consumerist attitudes have a bearing on their attitudes regarding collaboration in nursing.