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Jump start your new year with us as we chat virtually with journalist and author Julia Hotz about her book The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging.  

The Connection Cure reports on moving patient success stories and surprising self-discovery to help us discover the potential lasting and life-changing power of social prescribing. According to the AMA Journal of Ethics, social prescribing is a systematic approach to addressing patients’ social needs by referring them to or implementing community-based interventions and facilitating social connection based on individual need. Traditionally, when we get sick, health care professionals ask, “What’s the matter with you?” But around the world, teams of doctors, nurses, therapists, and social workers have started to flip the script, asking “What matters to you?” 

Some studies have shown that social prescribing can be effective for managing some symptoms of common ailments—depression, ADHD, addiction, trauma, anxiety, chronic pain, dementia, diabetes, and loneliness. By integrating age-old medicines like art, nature, movement, and volunteer service into patient’s daily lives, social prescriptions are changing health and healthcare in more than thirty countries. Julia Hotz travels around the world to survey them —sea-swimming lessons for depression, a fishing club for ADHD, a farm-based day-care for dementia, a phone-buddy program for social isolation, and many more.

Can't make it? A recording of this event will be available here.

Check out The Connection Cure in our collection here.

About the Author: Julia Hotz is a journalist based in New York. Her stories have appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, Scientific American, The Boston Globe, Time, and more. She helps other journalists report on the big new ideas changing the world at the Solutions Journalism Network. The Connection Cure is her first book.