The Feasibility and Impact of Practising Online Forest Bathing to Improve Anxiety, Rumination, Social Connection and Long-COVID Symptoms: 2022 McEwan

Abstract

Background: Long-COVID affects over 144 million people globally. In the absence of treatments, there is a need to establish the efficacy of therapies that improve patient outcomes. Forest bathing has been demonstrated to improve physical and mental outcomes but there is no evidence in Long-COVID patients. Accordingly, this pilot study sought to determine the feasibility and effectiveness of online forest bathing in adults with Long-COVID.

Methods: Feasibility was assessed by monitoring retention rates and participant feedback. In a waitlist controlled, repeated measures design, 22 Long-COVID patients completed weekly online surveys during a four-week waitlist control period, before engaging in four weekly online forest bathing sessions, completing post-intervention surveys following each session.

Results: In terms of retention, 27% did not provide post-intervention data, reasons for non-adherence were: feeling too ill, having medical appointments, or having career responsibilities. Compared with the waitlist control period, there were statistically significant improvements in Anxiety (49% decrease), Rumination (48% decrease), Social Connection (78% increase), and Long-COVID symptoms (22% decrease). Written qualitative comments indicated that participants experienced feelings of calm and joy, felt more connected socially and with nature, and experienced a break from the pain and rumination surrounding their illness.

Conclusions: Online Forest bathing resulted in significant improvements in well-being and symptom severity and could be considered an accessible and inexpensive adjunct therapy for Long-COVID patients. Where people have limited access to in-person nature, virtual nature may offer an alternative to improve health and well-being outcomes.

Open access, https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/22/14905

 

Aside from the unmistakable pattern that mental health is now basically wellness, relaxing for a bit, as long as you can afford it, it has also completely outclassed the snake oil era in clownishness. I was also told once by my GP to go to a spa. I am still angry at it years later. It's such a betrayal of what healthcare is supposed to be, and extremely insulting.

You have to laugh at this, but you also have to end this nightmare because holy hell:

Talk about not even caring what the problem is and just make it about something else entirely. This is medicine now, well, it's alternative medicine, but the line doesn't exist anymore:



Yes, this is all completely insane. Medicine has completely lost the plot so hard that we are firmly in the peak era of medical pseudoscience and disinformation.

 

Build and maintain green spaces that are safe, pleasant to be in and clean instead of crap like this.

 

Yes, or put some effort into enabling ill people to access to a real wood or natural space.

So much easier to justify your salary by distracting them for a bit and calling it "adjunct therapy", though. Streaming a comedy gig would have done just as well, but doesn't sound quite sciencey enough.

 

I enjoy forest bathing as much as the next person, but puh-lease, this is a serious medical condition. You wouldn't write a paper this was about cancer, would you? (Unfortunately some would.)

The fact that these scientists are claiming that nature therapy is a treatment for long Covid, while a significant proportion of people dropped out of the study because they were physically unable (or "feeling too ill" as the paper says) to go on a nature walk watch videos of people on nature walks underscores how badly these researchers misunderstand LC.

Edit: Didn't see the word "online"

 

What exactly is online forest bathing though?
I cannot work it out.
Is it joining a zoom session with a video cam of some nice muscly girls and guys bathing in the forest while you munch Twiglets in bed?
Or is it something a bit wetter?

 

More ordinary than you imagine...and childish. Honestly, I don't need anyone to help me contemplate nature !!

 

There is so much silliness to this I missed the online part.

I searched the paper for what they mean by that and I still don't have a clue. And in fact completely missed the fact that this is not about bathing at all, it's videos of people walking in the forest. So forest bathing as in sun bathing. I though it was about forest spas, or something like that.

So literally just watching videos recorded in a forest. Literally the VR cow, in a nutshell.

 

I like mindfulness and walks in nature but...can we get biomedical research so I can do it between running a business and working out instead of between light reading and taking a nap?

 

How disappointing.
But it adds a new dimension to subjective bias.
I mean surely the guide would be in a nice outfit with rippling muscles and wind blown hair?
Surely the sunlight glinting through the leaves would play on their open toed sandals?
Being on a waiting list would be sheer purgatory - reducing one to an ambulance case.
And so on.

 

I LOVE being in nature, it has an almost transformative effect on my mood & sense of coping, wellbeing, safety, hope, etc. It calms me like nothing else.

So will you researchers please get off your backsides, and do some research which will actually help those of us that are too ill to nature because, recover enough to access it again. Looking at photos of it just depresses me because i want to be there doing it & it reminds me that i cant.

 

From the paper:
"After each online session, participants were emailed a link to complete their weekly post-intervention surveys. Participants were contacted again at one-month follow-up to complete the same surveys plus an additional question asking whether they had continued to practice forest bathing."
Two much to ask that, for a statistically significant sample, they ran actimetry pre & post the intervention i.e. alongside the questionaries/"surveys" i.e. to see if the +ve outcomes correlated with objective measures of improvement?

As per adambeyoncelowe:
"There should be a step below very low quality for "uninterpretable", which would result in the evidence being set aside."
https://www.s4me.info/threads/lightning-process-discussion-thread.5809/page-9#post-448037

 

Yes. The "treatment" they're giving is so useless that we can be almost certain it's a placebo (at least for physical symptoms). They basically showed how strong the placebo effect (and/or natural recovery) can be--people convinced themselves they were 22% less sick.

 

Forest bathing comes from the Japanese. Since they have a tradition of nude bathing with both sexes and all ages especially in hot-springs, or bath houses en ville, I get the "bathing" experiential part. Immersing yourself in (water) or an environment with all your senses and a social equalizer since you are all naked, I guess.


I don't get the concept of a group doing guided 'forest therapy.' More beneficial to be quiet (and thus probably alone) there.

I can see introducing city-dwelling children to being in magnificent forests and such.

But 'forest therapy' via zoom? A sicko gimmick.

 

As best as I can tell, there is no bathing at all. It's "forest bathing" in the same sense as sunbathing. Except it's just videos with an online guide doing a tour. So it's as much sunbathing as watching videos of a sunny beach.

It's just insulting that money is wasted on this nonsense when so much research needs to be done. It's not the same pot but in the end what it means is that a whole lot of money spent on us is completely wasted because it's spent on nonsense.

Although this is more likely to be a commercial business selling this stuff, kinda like LP but less cultist.

 

This. It would rob you of almost everything that's life-affirming about being in a natural space.

I can get out sometimes and I enjoy some wildlife TV programmes, especially those featuring species I might have the chance of encountering one day. Watching them isn't so much about the experience of being in nature, it's about learning stuff I didn't know and being inspired to do something new.

If I couldn't get out, it'd feel more like a reminder of everything I'm missing.