The Connection Cure combines diligent science reporting, moving patient success stories, and surprising self-discovery to help us discover the lasting and life-changing power of social prescribing. Traditionally, when we get sick, health care professionals ask, “What’s the matter with you?” But around the world, teams of doctors, nurses, therapists, and social workers have started to flip the script, asking “What matters to you?”
Science shows that social prescribing is effective for treating symptoms of the modern world’s most common ailments—depression, ADHD, addiction, trauma, anxiety, chronic pain, dementia, diabetes, and loneliness. By integrating age-old medicines like art, nature, movement, and volunteer service into patient’s daily lives, social prescriptions are radically changing health and healthcare in more than thirty countries. Julia Hotz travels around the world to survey them —sea-swimming lessons for depression, “culture vitamins” for anxiety, a fishing club for ADHD, a farm-based day-care for dementia, a phone-buddy program for social isolation, and many more.
As the first book on social prescribing, The Connection Cure empowers you to find, experience, and implement this revolutionary medicine in your own community. The success stories Julia finds bring a long-known theory to life: if we can change our environment, we can change our health. By reconnecting to what matters to us, we can all start to feel better.