Ayahuasca Ceremony and Scope of Nursing Practice
Patrick Ryan
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Topics | Ayahuasca |
| Key points | Argues that ayahuasca ceremonies and nursing share care functions such as preparation, accompaniment, and response to distress, but differ in purpose, authority, and accountability. Proposes that nursing adds professional obligations around judgment, consent, and accountability whose exercise depends on law, role, and phase of care, and recommends explicit agreements about responsibilities, participant choice, and routes to further help before participation. Notes the accounts do not establish that adding nurses improves outcomes. |
Abstract
Ayahuasca ceremonies organize care through preparation, accompaniment, observation, and responses to distress. These functions resemble nursing work, but their purposes, authority, and accountability differ. This article examines what nursing can learn from documented ceremonial arrangements and what changes when a licensed nurse participates. It brings ethnographic accounts, religious organizational rules, historical nursing practice, professional guidance, and legal instruments into an interpretive comparison. Brazil and Quebec anchor the ayahuasca analysis; Oregon and Colorado extend it to licensed psilocybin services. The comparison identifies how helpers acquire standing, interpret difficulty, negotiate agreement, and seek assistance beyond their authority. Nursing adds professional obligations concerning judgment, consent, and accountability, whose exercise depends on the applicable law, the role accepted, and the phase of care. Preparation therefore requires both competence and an understanding of how the people organizing and receiving care recognize readiness. The accounts do not establish that adding nurses improves outcomes, and omissions in published descriptions do not demonstrate deficiencies in ceremonial care. The article argues for explicit agreements about responsibilities, participant choice, and routes to further help before participation begins. Shared care functions can inform nursing education and practice while ceremonial roles, community authority, and professional obligations remain distinct within their respective settings.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on ayahuasca, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| The globalization of ayahuasca: Harm reduction or benefit maximization? | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond | 2014 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience | 2003 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Towards psychedelic apprenticeship: Developing a gentle touch for the mediation and validation of psychedelic-induced insights and revelations. | 2022 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Ayahuasca healing beyond the Amazon: the globalization of a traditional indigenous entheogenic practice | 2008 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
Citations in the library
Cites 10
- Ayahuasca Preparations and Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors: A Potential Combination for Severe Adverse Interactions Journal of Psychoactive Drugs December 1, 1998
- Topographic pharmaco‐EEG mapping of the effects of the South American psychoactive beverage ayahuasca in healthy volunteers British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology June 1, 2002
- Ayahuasca’s entwined efficacy: An ethnographic study of ritual healing from ‘addiction’ International Journal of Drug Policy April 19, 2017
- Classic Psychedelic Coadministration with Lithium, but Not Lamotrigine, is Associated with Seizures: An Analysis of Online Psychedelic Experience Reports Pharmacopsychiatry August 4, 2021
- Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy Practices and Human Caring Science: Toward a Care-Informed Model of Treatment Journal of Humanistic Psychology April 23, 2021
and 5 more in the library