'Forest Bathers' Use Mother Nature to Heal, But Does It Work?

In June 2, a group of eight adults led by Christine Brandt walked through the William O'Brien State Park in the northern part of Stillwater, Minnesota, in hopes to improve their overall health quality by consciously absorbing the sights, scents and sounds of nature.

"This is called 'The Pleasure of Your Senses,' " Brandt told the group, as reported by Minnesota Star Tribune. "Imagine immersing yourself in warm water - you kind of melt. "Doing that in nature has a similar effect of feeling calm and peaceful."

Brandt is a hospice nurse and is one of two certified forest therapy guides on Minnesota. Forest therapy or also known as "forest bathing" is becoming one of the major trends in maintaining health, especially for active older adults.

Forest bathing is known to be a preventive medicine that came from Japan. The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries devised the term "shinrin-yoku", which means forest bathing, in 1982. The term was used to describe the practice of showering oneself in nature for better health.

"Just giving our brains a chance to reboot - that's what nature restoration therapy is all about," Jean Larson, who teaches about forest bathing at the University of Minnesota's Center for Spirituality and Healing told SW Times.

In a 2010 study, a team of Japanese researchers conducted field experiments across 24 forests in Japan involving 12 subjects each. The researchers found that walking and viewing forest environments promote lower concentrations of cortisol, lower pulse rate, lower blood pressure, greater parasympathetic nerve activity and lower sympathetic nerve activity than do city environments.

In a most recent study in Australia involving a larger population of 1,538, researchers discovered that visiting the park for 30 minutes or more every week experience lower rates of of depression and high blood pressure, reducing population prevalence of these illnesses by up to seven percent and nine percent respectively.