They are called green and blue prescriptions: medical advice to get back in contact with rural or coastal environments to improve our health.
And this is no woo-woo, hippy tree-hugging stuff – its benefit has been scientifically proven again and again.
Getting outside and away from artificial air, light and surfaces have significant positive effects on our mental and physical health, reducing our risk of cardiovascular disease, as well as symptoms of anxiety and depression, and making us move more.
Getting outside can also have a positive impact on sleep, focus and creativity.
The Australian Journal of General Practice has offered doctors guidelines around green and blue prescribing, indicating it was accepted practice for GPs to advise patients to, say, walk for 10 or 20 minutes outside or commit to regularly meditating near the ocean.
It advised that those with chronic disease and mental health conditions particularly benefitted and that a written prescription, verbal counselling or referral to another provider were all A-OK.
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We are only now catching up with this medical practice that is well established in other countries.
In 2020, the UK government pledged £4 million to support additional green and blue prescribing in four urban areas hard hit by Covid.
Doctors in several Canadian provinces have been able to prescribe time in nature to their patients, including a pass to access the country’s national parks, since 2022.
In Japan, health practitioners have recommended shinrin-yoku or forest bathing – connecting with nature through the senses – since the 1980s, when evidence was mounting that urban life aggravated depression and disconnection.
It is not surprising that the healing power of the outdoors is now being defined, affirmed and embraced by our doctors.
Latin was the international language of scholarship and science during the formative years of modern medicine – when the phrase ‘vis medicatrix naturae’ or ‘the healing power of nature’ emerged.
How lucky are we on the Sunshine Coast to have mountains and sea to bathe in?
Get outside. Go blue. Go green.
Whether it is sunshine, vitamin sea or bush bathing, the Earth’s embrace could be the best medicine ever prescribed.
Dr Jane Stephens is a UniSC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer.
