Contact with nature may have therapeutic effects, says a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at Emory University. Writing this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Howard Frumkin says that interactions with natural landscapes, plants, and animals can have a “soothing, restorative, and even healing” effect. He says natural places may even cause some diseases to “run their course faster.” Harvard scientist E.O. Wilson writes an accompanying piece in the journal, praising Frumkin for showing “why it is wiser … 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.”
