Harvesting Health

Abstract

Providing meaningful activities for persons with dementia in institutional care settings challenges many activity staff. Horticultural therapy (HT), is one approach to addressing this challenge. HT involves the use of plant materials to achieve measurable treatment goals with special populations. The current exploratory study investigated differential responses of persons with dementia to three types of HT activities: cooking, crafts, and planting. We conducted HT activities three times per week at an adult day service (ADS) program over a nine-week period. Observational data for each participant were collected during HT and more traditional ADS activities at five-minute intervals using a modified Dementia Care Mapping (DCM) technique. Predominant behavior and affect of each timeframe were recorded for participants. High levels of positive affect and engagement were observed during all of the categories of HT activities, but no significant differences were found between the three categories of HT activities. While levels of engagement in the presented HT and traditional activities were similar, the percentage of time spent doing nothing was lower during HT than traditional activities. Affect was more positive during HT than traditional activities. The current study lends support to the value of HT activities for participants with dementia regardless of the HT modality employed. de men tia d e m e n t i a ©    www.sagepublications.com  () -

Neuroscience Application for the Analysis of Cultural Ecosystem Services Related to Stress Relief in Forest

“…Spending time in nature is associated with good health outcomes, in particular when patients undertake activities such as gardening, which are useful for well-being and neuro-rehabilitation [52,53]. Some hospital are now equipped with healing gardens to stimulate the contact of patients with nature [54] and horticultural therapy has been found to be a successful activity to alleviate dementia [55]. Within this context, forests may be important not only for prevention but also for rehabilitation and stress relief.…”

Ecotherapy – A Forgotten Ecosystem Service: A Review

“…Horticultural therapy (HT) is a process through which gardening activities, interaction with plants and closeness to nature are used as a rehabilitative strategy (Simson and Straus, 1998). Horticultural therapy has been shown to improve mood state reducing stress and its contribution to coronary heart disease (based on POMS score) (Wichrowski et al, 2005), improve self-esteem and reduce depression (Son et al, 2004; Lee et al, 2008), improve sleep and cognitive issues in dementia patients (Lee and Kim, 2008), improve engagement and mood-related to dementia (Gigliotti et al, 2004; Gigliotti and Jarrott, 2005) and as a general treatment for mental health issues (Szofran and Myer, 2004). Further, horticultural activities (Richards and Kafami, 1999) and integrated adventure therapy programs (Bennett et al, 1998), have been shown to be useful in substance abuse treatment.…”

The Gardening Activities to Reduce Postpartum Stress in Japanese Postpartum Women: Preliminary Evidence from Pilot Single-Arm Trial Study

“…All procedures were performed in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration. We estimated that a sample size of 15 would allow us to detect signi cant differences in the cognitive score before and after gardening activity with 80% power (α = 0.05) by previous studies (Alston, 2010) (Gigliotti, Jarrott, & Yorgason, 2004) and we determined our sample size to be 15.…”