PaRx: In Canada, doctors are now prescribing nature as treatment; what you need to know

Some doctors in four provinces of Canada are now prescribing year-long national park passes to their patients under a program called PaRx as a way to improve physical and mental health.

Led by Dr Melissa Lem, a family physician, PaRx or Park Prescriptions recently partnered with Parks Canada to provide free admission to national parks, national historic sites, or national marine conservation areas.

It can be termed as forest therapy. It  has been around for sometime now and proponents argue it has healing effects on people with physical and mental health issues.

Let’s take a look at the PaRx program and how this form of forest therapy is helping people with their health issues:

What is Forest Therapy?

According to Harvard Health Publishing, forest therapy is inspired by the Japanese practice of ‘shinrin-yoku’, or forest bathing. It is a guided outdoor healing practice.

In forest therapy, trained guides lead people through nature at a deliberately slow pace and invite them to experience the pleasures of nature through all of their senses.

What Japanese call ‘shinrin-yoku’, Germans call ‘volksmarsch’, Norwegians call ‘koselig’, and South Koreans call ‘hit mung’.

The names are different but at its essence it’s about letting one go in a nature and be healed by it.

According to PaRx, spending time in nature decreases risk of heart diseases, high blood pressure and diabetes. Nature therapy improves the psychological wellbeing of cancer patients and activates tumour-killing cells.

What is PaRx?

Canada’s first national nature prescription program, PaRx, was launched by the BC Parks Foundation in 2020 in the country’s British Columbia province.

Over 1,000 doctors, nurses and other licensed health care professionals are authorised to prescribe nature to patients.

Each prescriber who registers with PaRx receives a nature prescription file customised with a unique provider code, and instructions for how to prescribe and log nature prescriptions.

Recently the program was launched in Canada’s Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario.

According to PaRx, nature prescriptions were named one of the top eight global wellness trends in 2019, and are being implemented around the world.

“The UK and other countries are now investing in park prescription pilots to help address mental and physical health problems and the resulting strain on their health care systems and economies,” it said in a press statement.

Apart from improving patients’ health, park prescriptions can help in protection and restoration of nature.

“PaRx’s commitment to improving patient and planetary health was recently recognized by the World Health Organization in its COP26 Special Report on Climate Change and Health, where it was featured as a way to inspire protection and restoration of nature as the foundation of our health—one of only two case studies cited from North America,” it said.

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