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Did you know just how many of today’s modern medicines were actually first part of “folk” apothecaries, often handed down from ancient knowledge? With the new emerging science of EcoMedicine, there is an emerging movement around ancient knowledge and nature therapy. [...]
This is the 40 minute invited “The Science of Nature as Medicine”, guest lecture (zoom video) to Harvard’s “Introduction to Lifestyle Medicine” course I taught in January 2020, with 20 minutes of questions. Many of the references for the studies I cite can be found in [...]
Green Rx is a nature-based prescription. It can include 5 (five) parts: A. lower-on-the-food-chain-food (e.g. grown, harvested, minimally processed, cooked locally), B. nature therapy (from forest bathing to surf therapy to therapeutic gardening to time with animals), C. aromatherapy, D. dietary [...]
Because herbs come from nature, many people believe they’re safe to take at any time. But that’s simply not true. There are certain herbs you should avoid when pregnant or trying to become pregnant. In fact, many herbs should not be taken while trying to conceive, during pregnancy, or [...]
Welcome to the next installment of our biweekly series on the many different kinds of nature therapy. This week’s topic is gardening for dementia. So what is gardening for dementia? Unlike some of the other topics we’ve covered, this one is a little easier to guess the meaning behind; [...]
Our series of deep dives on the various kinds of nature therapy continues with our eighth blog. This week, our topic is therapeutic horticulture, also known as horticultural therapy. So what is therapeutic horticulture, and what is horticultural therapy?In a nutshell, therapeutic horticulture [...]
In this week’s installment of our series of deep dives on the various kinds of nature therapy, we’ll be taking a closer look at care farms. What are care farms? Simply put, a care farm involves the therapeutic use of farming practices to facilitate healing. Also known as green [...]
Athletic or not, we all need water—and plenty of it. Your body on water is far more resilient than your body without it; hydration affects how our body works in daily activities, how prone it is to injury, and how well it recovers from injury. Water facilitates hundreds of [...]
Hopefully you’ve been following (and enjoying!) our bi-weekly series on the many different kinds of nature therapy. This week, our spotlight lands on blue care, a field adjacent to water therapy and aquatic therapy. Blue care is a subset of nature therapy that champions the power of water to [...]
Today’s deep dive on one of the many kinds of nature therapy is a personal favorite of mine: pet therapy, also known as animal-assisted therapy. Those of us who have had the pleasure of caring for a pet—whether it be a dog, cat, bird or rabbit—already know implicitly the [...]