Discover what it would take to become the healthiest version of yourself in this refreshing look at health, how we treat it, and how finding true healing often has nothing to do with traditional medicine.
Traditionally, Western medicine has led with the question, "What's the matter with you?" But in hospitals and clinics around the world, healthcare professionals are now asking, "What matters to you?" By making this simple shift, a conversation is opened with a health care provider, a patient, and the wider community they belong to. Instead of being narrowly treated with pharmaceutical prescriptions, what journalist Julia Hotz describes as the de facto "diagnose-treat-repeat" cycle of American healthcare-patients can understand and treat the more deep-seated issues that are affecting their mental and physical health with a social prescription.
Instead of doctors prescribing only a pill or surgery, “The Connection Cure” presents a bold reinvention of health care where health professionals connect patients to community activities and resources, or social prescriptions. Hotz offers five categories of social prescribing: nature, movement, art, service, and belonging. Backed by research, these prescriptions have proven particularly effective for different ailments: art for those who have experienced trauma, service for aging individuals who are looking to find purpose as their physical health declines, and nature for those who experience high stress and strained mental health. We are social beings in search of valuable ways to spend time on this earth, and social prescribing can be the solution for the loneliness, distress, and pain that plague so many of us.
Hotz tours around the world to report on the most innovative ways countries are incorporating social prescribing into their healthcare programs. From community hospitals for the elderly in Singapore to open water swimming in England, forest bathing in Japan to community farm work in the Netherlands, she shows that there are programs that fit every health concern in every culture around the world.
By empowering patients to ask for a better system of health, we get better health overall. And it starts with that one, deceptively simple question: what matters to you?
