Student Spotlight
Merrily Kuhn, R.N., Ph.D.; N.D. and Ph.D. candidate
Like many individuals who choose to enter the nursing profession, Merrily Kuhn’s first love was patient care. Yet after spending one short year providing traditional hospital care, Kuhn soon realized an even more compelling personal goal: to teach other nurses how to more effectively interact within a “dis-eased” model of traditional healthcare.
She wanted to teach nurses how to empower their patients to heal themselves. She wanted nurses to know how to help affect policy within their own hospital settings and how to be an external voice for political change. Also, of at least equal importance, she wanted to encourage other nurses to keep learning and growing so as not to burn-out within a healthcare delivery system that unquestionably needs its brightest minds energetically engaged.
Noting that all of this might be a tall order, Kuhn decisively shifted career directions -- as nimbly as an ICU nurse uses total focus to stabilize one patient, then spins on a dime to go help another patient with an entirely different need.
Back to school she went, to a traditional college at which she earned her first Ph.D., in physiology. Never one to accept the status quo, while in school she envisioned the creation of her own business and also wrote her first book.
“Back in the early 1980s there were only two pharmacology books in our curriculum,” she recalled, “neither of which I liked.” One day she commented on this to a pharmaceutical rep who knew Kuhn’s work ethic well enough to stop and pay attention to her expressing an unmet need.
“When I scoffed that I could write a better book than what was currently available, I guess you could say that the universe heard me and responded through the drug rep’s corporate voice, essentially saying, ‘well okay then, do it.’ This chance remark led to my first book contract, a pharmacology text which was published five years later.” The first book contract became her opportunity to devote significant time to research, writing, and teaching – and Pharmacotherapuetics: A Nursing Process Approach took on a life of its own. It is now in its fourth edition!
Merrily Kuhn teaches at NY’s Daemon College and directs Educational Services, a national consulting firm that specializes in the provision of Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for nurses.
As of 2003, Kuhn has written or collaborated on 10 books: from pediatric care to CAM approaches. She is particularly proud of a new book on herbal healthcare, cowritten with New Jersey master herbalist David Winston. Kuhn has served on various international editorial boards for nursing journals and holistic health publications. She maintains yet another voice by writing an ongoing holistic health feature column.
Teaching thousands of nursing students and various allied healthcare practitioners through Educational Services is a continued affirmation of the general public’s ever growing fascination with complementary and alternative modalities. “Patients want to understand about how magnets and homeopathy work – they don’t just express interest in trying them,” adds Merrily.
But while general mainstream interest in CAM is keen, the research models that add scientific validity certainly need work. “The NIH offers significant CAM research funding,” she laments, “but the natural health community is decades behind our allopathic counterparts in knowing how to tap into it. Many times, we would much rather just do it than study and document its results.” She hopes to shed more light on both the mindsets and the methodologies.
Physician organizations often enjoy vast grant-writing expertise and connections but then when they do receive funding, are ill-equipped to actually advance the state of the art, she adds. “We know that CAM is a profession unto itself, not just a side interest: acupuncture as a prime example.”
“Physicians cannot just take a 250-hour CEU course and think they can achieve the same results as an expert in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). There is no question that acupuncture is an effective therapy for many ailments, but a flawed research model means that precious resources are wasted, or at least not optimized.”
In her personal life, Kuhn practices what she teaches. She and her husband are “health nuts” who run / walk three miles every morning, choose a healthy diet and use vitamin and mineral supplements.
Kuhn also makes sure she takes a sense of humor to work with her, locally or wherever her next nationwide classroom of healthcare professionals may be.
“For patients, humor enhances the immune system. For students, humor helps people retain classroom teachings. We can always remember the things that make us laugh,” she concludes. “Humor can make us more receptive and able to retain voluminous information and complex concepts.”
With a name like Merrily, this student of humor clearly knows whereof she speaks.
Visit Merrily at www.educationalservices.org.
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