As a Nature Doctor, Ecopsychotherapist, and Forest Therapy Guide certified by ANFT, I was contacted in April 2021 by a family health doctor from the Brazilian Unified Health System, who works in a unit of a small municipality located in the extreme south of Brazil, close to the border with Uruguay and Argentina.
At the time, he reported being away from work on sick leave due to the excessive work of caring for people with symptoms and suspected cases of Covid 19. He was diagnosed with burnout syndrome, mental confusion, and high blood pressure. Due to disagreements with his wife, he was away from home, living in another municipality, far from his wife and two children. He was instructed to rest at home and was prescribed antidepressant and antihypertensive medication.
I offered him an approach that consisted of weekly therapeutic sessions and prescribed at least three walks a week in the woods; he accepted. I started with the concepts, values, and methods of Ecopsychology and Forest Bathing. Due to the social distance determined by the pandemic, our meetings were held at a distance through video conferences.
From the second week onwards, he began to report that he was experiencing improvements in his health status, reporting that he felt his mind calmer, and that he slept better. He reported feeling the urge to talk again. I suggested that he talk to the forest and the beings that exist there.
By the end of the first month, his blood pressure had returned to proper levels. He alternated his reports with moments of laughter and tears, sometimes profound. He recognized and reflected on the oscillation he experienced between moments of sadness, indifference, and joy. Intelligent, and very attuned to global crises, he expressed that he would resume his contacts with the global network on climate change to which he belongs and is one of the protagonists.
From the second to the third month, he showed surprising improvements. He made peace with his wife and returned home. He said he was happy to have made that decision and to be very well welcomed by his wife and children. He applied for the suspension of his medical license and resumed his work as a family doctor. With a lighter and calmer mind, he resumed taking the doctoral course he had planned to do before he got sick. He discontinued his use of antidepressant and antihypertensive medications, opting instead to drink herbal tea. He said he was happy to be in regular contact with nature.
At the beginning of the fourth month, he revealed that he had taken walks in the woods with his family, introducing the practice of collecting edible fungi that are plentiful in the region where he resides. He felt much better, integrated into himself, with his interpersonal relationships, and with nature. We evaluated that from then on, he could go on with his life without the need for therapeutic sessions.
I emphasize that the lessons I learned in training as a Forest Therapy guide at ANFT had a prominent place throughout this journey, opening up possibilities to integrate the practices of a nature doctor, those of ecopsychotherapy, and with that of a Forest Therapy Guide.
The organization of humans – initially in tribes, then in societies, and at a more advanced stage, in civilizations – has awakened since 300,000 B.C. The first records on health care trace back to 30,000 B.C, when the so-called shamanism emerges – in other terms, the origin of medicine. The Medicine Shaman, advocates that “Health is a perception of the universe and all its inhabitants as beings of a single material. Health is communicating with animals, plants, stars and minerals… Health is expanding beyond your own state of consciousness to experience the whispers and vibrations of the universe”.
With its emergence around 3,000 B.C., Traditional Chinese Medicine is based on philosophical concepts that encompass a vital force or current (qi), the balance between two opposing and complementary vital forces (yin and yang), and in the theory that all things are composed of five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water; that is, the elements of nature.
The third branch, Western Medicine, has its origins in Hippocrates (460 – 351 BC). The Hippocratic doctrine is like what we now call holistic medicine. Hippocrates believed that knowledge of the human body was only possible from the knowledge of human being as a whole; the body as an integrated component of nature. The environment, the climate, the way of life, the food, and the emotions determined the illnesses and the cure. Hippocrates’ main argument was that the whole body contains the elements of healing. The one who performs the cure is nature itself, and it is up to the doctor only to accompany it, taking care not to disturb the process of spontaneous recovery of the body.
By moving away from nature and from itself, contemporary human behavior is the origin and result of a life essentially artificialized and dystopian; violent, fragmented and inhumane. Physicians and health professionals have the opportunity in their daily practices to revisit the original paradigm and concepts of health care, based on the inseparability of health and nature.