Nature's medicine

By Francesca Lyman

SPECIAL TO MSNBC

April 11 - "Nature is the best medicine," wrote the ancient Greek philosopher Hippocrates in 400 B.C. Today, in our urbanized and denatured world, there's added meaning to the famous quote, says Dr. Howard Frumkin, a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. "If we put ourselves in beautiful natural places," he says, "we may find that we feel better and that certain diseases even run their course faster."

LONG BEFORE modern medicine - and until fairly recently - people turned to nature for healing. I think back to the story of my father, a sickly, asthmatic child, who came down with double pneumonia in the 1930s, an era before antibiotics. It was an elixir of the Wild West that saved his life.

The family doctor came for a house call and "advised mother that a Chicago winter would not be helpful to his sickly state," recalls his sister Pat. Rather than prescribing pills for the pneumonia, the doc sent him for "a cure" to a dude ranch outside warm, dry Tucson, Ariz. My aunt Pat, who went along, still remembers the magic of the experience, like "the cowboys swinging me up on their horses." Riding, learning campfire songs on a ukulele (as well as how to skin a dead rattlesnake) and just being in the fresh, restorative air and magnificent vistas of the wide-open desert West did the trick - fast and thoroughly.

These days, of course, doctors don't prescribe such "cures" (though some might welcome them), and more's the pity, says Frumkin. Contact with animals, plants, natural landscapes and wilderness can have "soothing, restorative and even healing" effects, he writes in the April issue of American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Amassing evidence from surveys and case studies around the world, he reveals that clinics, hospitals, nursing homes and even prisons that incorporate some element of nature - even just a nice view - show higher rehabilitation rates.

It may be that we humans are hard-wired to have "a deep-seated connection with the natural world," writes Frumkin. He quotes Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, author of "The Biophilia Hypothesis," describing "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms."

'There's a centuries-long tradition of healing gardens and looking toward nature for restoration.'

- DR. HOWARD FRUMKIN

Ironically, though, says Frumkin, who sees patients injured by exposures to toxic chemicals and dirty air, most environmental health practitioners like himself are the last to see the environment from this perspective, when they more often analyze it for toxins. Yet "the natural environment, broadly conceived, can also enhance health."

"There's a centuries-long tradition of healing gardens and looking toward nature for restoration," he says. "In a day when people spent more time in hospitals than they do now, there used to be more attention paid to their surroundings."

Not enough attention today though, he noticed, reading signs in his own surroundings. From the window of his office in one of the new medical buildings along Clinton Road, which connects the Emory campus and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he watched bulldozers rip out a 2-acre stand of hardwood oak and maple to put up another nursing school. "It was a sad thing to watch," he says. "The once beautiful forest view out my window is now a brick wall."

For many years, Frumkin says, he had been "thinking about toxicity," then realized that perhaps the biggest generator of toxins is urban sprawl, spreading people out and making more of them drive more cars further distances to bigger houses, needing more power, which then generate more pollutants and destroy more greenery that can filter and clean those toxins. He started working with Atlanta civic groups to help plan better design and transportation and preserve green space, and generally, he says, "be a voice for health in the capital of sprawl."

This also got him thinking about the neglected place of nature in contemporary health care, despite the long tradition - stretching from ancient Greece to the New England transcendentalist to conservationists like John Muir - of the idea that, as he writes, "the human relationship with nature ... might be a component of good health."

Scouring the medical literature, he found scores of case studies showing evidence of the notion:

Animals. Pets are known to keep their owners healthy, but Frumkin enumerates study after study showing that pet-owners are statistically healthier than petless ones, when it comes to signs of heart disease and stress, among other ailments. One study found that patients awaiting surgery were "most relaxed" if they opted to watch an aquarium (instead of looking at a picture of a waterfall or sitting quietly).

Plants. People feel better around plants, according to surveys, and office employees feel calmer and more relaxed in offices with them. Even in prisons, one study concluded that gardening had a "strangely soothing effect," making "pacifists of potential battlers."

Natural scenes. Landscapes outside hospitals, prisons, psychiatric institutions and other rehabilitation settings can make a difference to patients inside, research shows. One study compared the difference between a view of trees or a brown brick wall on patients after surgery; those facing trees healed faster, needed less painkillers and suffered fewer complications.

Wilderness immersion. So-called wilderness therapy, used on psychiatric patients, cancer patients and people suffering from addictions, has shown distinct benefits, from better cooperation and trust among depressed adolescents to an increased sense of "aliveness, well-being and energy" among mental patients.

This isn't such a new and original hypothesis, Frumkin says, so much as the "rediscovery of an old wisdom," and an effort to apply it creatively in collaborations between medicine and other disciplines, like "horticultural therapy" in prisons, or hospitals designed with more access to nature. Still, the concept needs far more research to figure out where best to apply it. Which illnesses might be best helped this way, and how?

"Much of our medical training and research centers around pharmaceuticals, those magic bullets for disease, rather than low-tech solutions that don't profit anyone," he says. Because we live in a very technological society, patients, too, "want that quick technical fix," he adds. "Yet there might be a low-tech, non-toxic, non-glitzy treatments that are much more effective," he says, "with little or no side effects, less expense - even free."

Pulitzer-prize winning E.O. Wilson thought enough of the idea to write, in an accompanying journal essay, "Dr. Frumkin has shown, among his other enlightenments in this essay, why it is wiser, for example, to save the last stand of old-growth forests in the permanent service of preventive medicine than to cut them down for the short-term purchase of more pharmaceuticals."

It may not work for everybody, admits Frumkin. "There are Woody Allens among us, who'd prefer to spend a day watching a film," he laughs, "or people who say, 'I hate mosquitoes. All I want is to sit by the TV.' " More likely, though, it could resonate among Americans who "find themselves trapped in high-stress built environments," John Stilgoe, a professor of environmental studies at Harvard, writes in a second editorial accompanying the report. Stilgoe hopes this idea signals "what may well prove to be an astonishingly fruitful collaboration" among medical, design and environmental specialists that could supply a much needed health tonic "for a public desperately seeking sustained well-being."

Francesca Lyman is an environmental and travel journalist and editor of the American Museum of Natural History book, "Inside the Dzanga-Sangha Rain Forest" (Workman, 1998).