NATU RAL WO R LD
Rediscovering human– nature connectedness through social prescribing Craig Lister Green Gym Managing Director, The Conservation Volunteers
We evolved and excelled in the natural world, overcoming challenge through collaborative effort, sharing success and failure as communities to the point where we became the world’s dominant species. Over the past 30 or 40 years have we consistently expected more from the NHS as well as ‘suffering’ from a wholesale shift in activity levels and an increase in isolation, often to a point of learned helplessness. Social prescribing reminds us of the power of community, demedicalising many treatments and providing an opportunity for us to be central to our own health and wellbeing.
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I had some challenges during my childhood and left school with few qualifications, which I now consider a valuable experience. Deciding I needed to take control for myself I joined the RAF at 17 and immediately benefited from the camaraderie and support and drive the military gives. Fast forward 12 years post military, I retrained as an exercise physiologist aligned to my sporting activities, but found a passion to help others help themselves, particularly those with complex obesity and chronic back pain, the latter being the subject of my postgraduate research degree. This evolved into national roles within public health and exercise referral where I developed an interest in evolutionary physiology and the underpinning components of a healthy, happy life.
The biomedical model continues to provide wonderful outcomes for many people. But for many human problems technological and pharmaceutical options are neither appropriate nor effective. It seems unlikely that the NHS will be able to serve an ageing population with complex needs without fundamental system change. As this realisation dawns on policymakers worldwide, I am becoming more optimistic that through social prescribing we may rediscover what we once knew so well about health and wellbeing: something we lost, or that was taken from us inadvertently, or in some cases deliberately. ‘The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician. Therefore, the physician must start from nature, with an open mind.’ (Paracelsus, 1493–1541)
As an exercise physiologist I have helped many people with complex obesity and chronic pain to achieve their goals. Often, they were people for whom the normal biomedical model had proved unsuccessful. I got much better at helping them make progress once I realised that the
physiology component was (relatively) the straightforward part. By far the bigger challenge I faced was in how to support behaviour change. Having taken additional training in this area, I found that by using motivational interviewing methods I could engage more effectively within this psychosocial space. As I spent more time in the voluntary sector, my understanding of the breadth of what constituted health and wellbeing evolved further. Out in this arena I met many wonderful (usually unsung) people, who help their communities every day, through their selfless, compassionate and direct support.
Wired for nature If we compress human evolution into 24 hours, then for around 23 hours and 58 minutes – more than 99% of our time as the human species – we lived and worked in the great outdoors. In this wild and wonderful but mostly challenging environment, despite the lack of medicines, technology, farranging communications, and our relative weakness and vulnerability to many predators, homo sapiens
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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Volume 15 Issue 3 Autumn 2018
