Discuss: Un-Natural Remedies

I suggest you check out sereneview at http://www.sereneview.com/. This company is a pioneer in nature-based healing in hospital settings.

It is good to read such articles. The only thing is: indigenous peoples, and our societies before we turned into a mechanicistic human outcome and guinea pigs, knew this very well.
It is good to see that through the cracks these theories - which are in fact..facts - are becoming more accepted and popular.
I have many examples (and my father was a pediatrician, so I was fully aware of the medical world) of myself doing what I thought was best to recovery from accidents or some sickness - and at elast 7 times out of 10 I did NOT listen to doctors, but to the magnet called Nature (I live in the mountains) especially for problems related to broken bones, sparined joints etc. Ride on.

I serve in the board of a hospital located in the midst of Catskill Mountains in New York, and was faced constantly with the shortage of medical doctors willing to relocate into the country.  As the article points out, there are a lot of wonderful assets in the mountain community and the medical service facility in the rural area.  Friendly and responsive staff is one of them.  Now, of course, the beautiful nature surrounding us is the best asset many other institutions would envy. 

It is good to reaffirm our inherent connection with nature.

I wonder about ocean views. Would they also promote the same healing effects?

At the Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments (http://virtualpsych.uwaterloo.ca), we read Nalina Nadkarni’s article with great interest.  Some of our own research has also suggested that simulations of natural scenes can produce profoundly restorative effects.  Such effects not only hold promise for promoting more effective healing, as suggested by Roger Ulrich, but they may also give us some tools to help understand more precisely how such effects come about.  As we’re sure readers of this magazine would agree, nothing can replace real nature.  But, experiments designed to help us understand some of the pathways by which exposure to nature promotes health and well-being might give us even more reasons to cherish and protect it.

I agree that a picture of a tree would be better than the view of a brick wall if those were the only two choices but I have to tell you that when I read this article I had the creepy feeling that I’ve seen something like this in a futuristic movie - was it “Soylent Green”? - about living in a world where nature was gone and you could go into a chamber and watch a movie of the natural world before you got “recycled!”

I believe that our illnesses come from being out of touch with the natural world and our own nature, all the time, and that we will only be well individually and collectively when we return to living in harmony with the natural world.

We need the REAL tree with all the unpredictability and mess, the falling leaves, the birds and bugs, the breathing in CO2 and the breathing out oxygen of a tree. I’d rather have a real potted geranium than a hundred dollar a foot illusion.

Rebecca, we struggle with these kinds of questions a lot.  The last thing we’d want in our work is the suggestion that we’re trying to replace nature with a pale reflection.  Yet the (sad) fact is that many of us have very limited access to natural settings.  If we suspect that these windows have powerful effects on human health, is it ethical to NOT use them?  Besides, perhaps mere exposure to these displays would serve to remind people of a connection to the natural world whose importance they’ve forgotten.

I wasn’t just being sarcastic when I said that about the potted geranium. I think the same amount of money would be better spent at least on real plants. There are many plants that clean the air and benefit indoor air quality. Courtyards with oxygen producing plants and negative ion producing waterfalls are easy to incorporate into many building designs.

I just want to see people focusing on dealing with the real problem, not covering up the lack of natural energy in our world with expensive substitutes.