Learning About Nature-Based Therapy

     For our Foundations class before spring break, our professor made the wonderful decision to change one of our classes to an online "choose your own adventure," so we had more time to study for our final exam in Gross Anatomy. For the choose your own adventure aspect of the assignments, we got to pick a podcast to listen to. At first, I was going to listen to a podcast about occupational therapy and diabetes management, since I am a type one diabetic and I thought it would be interesting to listen to something relevant to me. But, within about 30 seconds, the speakers said that they would be focusing on type two diabetes, and I immediately lost interest and decided to listen to something else. That might be a little selfish, but I knew if it wasn't something I was interested in, I wouldn't pay attention. So I decided to listened to the podcast on nature-based therapy, which was much more interesting to me.

     The basis of nature-based therapy is using nature and being outdoors to help with therapy, or to be the actual therapy. While the podcast mostly talked about using nature-based therapy with children, it could likely also be used with older patients. One example of using nature-based therapy that one of the OTs gave was working with a child with sensory processing disorder in an environment with water to give them different types of stimulation than what they would experience inside. Some different settings an OT using nature-based therapy could work in are the beach, the woods, or a creek. A concern that some parents have with this type of therapy is that it may be dangerous for their child, but the OT argued that there can be just as many dangers inside, and that the benefits of bringing kids outside often outweigh the dangers. OTs working with this type of therapy would still use assessments to determine if the therapy is working for clients, the therapy would just be carried out outside. Nature-based therapy is not something I had heard of before, but now that I know about it, it makes a lot of sense and can easily be applied to client-centered practice.