Health, Reimagined: Why Connection is the Best Medicine

Julia Hotz shares 5 key insights from The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging.

Have you heard of social prescribing? It’s a recent trend in health care, in which practitioners are recommending non-pharmaceutical treatments for their patients, including things like volunteering, exercising outdoors, and joining book clubs. The idea is that a strong sense of meaning and connection can be a powerful supplement to — or replacement for — drug therapy for a variety of ailments. Journalist

Julia Hotz

writes about this approach in the new book The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging. Julia has written for The New York Times, WIRED, Scientific American, The Boston Globe, Time, and other outlets. She also writes

The Connection Cure

on Substack. Here she is to share 5 of her big ideas.

1. Social prescribing helps us rethink sickness—less as fixed disorders in the body and more as “reactions” to a stressful environment.

Social prescribing is a big new idea. But it’s rooted in a big old idea: the idea that our environment influences our health, for worse and for better.

Ancient philosophers, Indigenous thinkers, holistic medical experts, and positive psychologists have been independently preaching this idea for thousands of years. Large-scale population studies tell us it’s true: up to 80 percent of our health is socially determined by factors like where we live, with whom we live, and how we live. To be healthy, we need basic resources—food, cash, a safe home, a stable job. But we also need sources of joy, meaning, and relationships: Is there someone we can call at 3 a.m. in a crisis? Do we have a reason to wake up in the morning? Do we have outlets to cope with the sadness, anger, and fear that come with being human?