• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, October 9, 2025

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“Get a prescription to visit Sweden, and see what we can do for your wellness,” declares a new global ad campaign from the Visit Sweden tourism agency.

“Sweden is filled with activities that make you feel good,” explains a doctor in one spot.

Such activities, she elaborates, include a “cool climate” that fosters “an ideal environment for deep restorative sleep,” a “classic sauna” that “activates your parasympathetic nervous system for profound relaxation,” and since “the sun won't go down for 100 days, imagine what 24/7 light therapy could do for you.”

Ah, if only such a prescription were possible, I thought upon seeing Visit Sweden’s press release announcing the campaign.

Turns out, though, that they’re not making it up.

Nils Persson, chief marketing officer at Visit Sweden, tells Pharma & Health Insider that, in examining travel trends with his creative agency Prime Weber Shandwick (Sweden), they hit upon the idea of not only highlighting the benefits of visiting the country but also increasing “the awareness of preventive care like culture and nature prescriptions.”

To learn more about these “nature prescriptions,” I spoke with Dr. Stacy Beller Stryer, associate medical director at Park RX America (PRA), a small nonprofit that’s taking the lead in pushing the concept in the U.S.

Visit Sweden had contacted Dr. Stryer to provide quotes for the press release, but I wanted  to learn more about how nature prescriptions work – and why I had never heard of them before.

Nonprofits have been taking the lead in this field, with about 99 other groups also involved in some way, Dr. Styer said. Unlike prescriptions for pharma drugs, she notes, “nature’s free. It’s hard to sell.”

Evidence-based research has long espoused the benefits of being in nature “to improve physical health, mental health and sense of well-being,” she said.

The Swedish campaign resonated, Dr. Stryer said, because “Sweden itself really embodies nature, being outdoors, and accessibility…and culturally, the prescription we would write is kind of what they [Swedes] do a on daily basis – they get a break in the middle of the day, with conversation, coffee, whatever little treat they want. They get some downtime.”

She added, “Realistically, most people aren’t going to be able to go to Sweden, but if we can embody the spirit of what Sweden does, we’d be going a long way toward getting outdoors, taking a daily break, accessing nature.”

Indeed, downtime is a key part of how nature prescriptions have evolved since they first started being issued some 20 years ago.

PRA  was founded eight years ago “to implement a national movement to encourage nature prescriptions.”

They were actually first called “park prescriptions,” but that proved a bit restricting, Dr. Stryer recalled. The more specific the prescription as to place and time, the more likely doctors will provide it and the more likely patients will comply, she explained. “If someone is anxious and just needs downtime,” she gave as an example, “they may just want to sit on a bench in the park or lie in a hammock. So we talk to them about their schedule. When can you get out? Let’s say Monday at noon, you have a half-hour, and Friday at 4.”

PRA serves both patients and healthcare providers (HCPs), providing the latter with a free platform to expedite the nature prescription process. The former, meanwhile, are advised to lobby their HCPs: “Unlike pharmaceutical companies who spend billions of dollars to hire ‘drug reps’ to go to doctors' offices and hospitals to market medications, PRA depends on you to speak up for yourself and ask your healthcare provider for your unique nature prescription.”

While PRA serves the U.S., another nonprofit, the BC Parks Foundation's five-year-old PaRx program, plays a similar role in Canada.

Late last month, just days after Sweden began positioning itself as “the world's first country to which travel can be prescribed by a doctor,” PaRx announced its own first: Manulife had become the first insurance company anywhere to support a national nature prescription program.

Dr. Stryer admitted that such a goal is “unfortunately far down the road” in the U.S., although that “would go a long way in helping increase the number of nature prescriptions written.”  Neither could she provide me with any info on if I could get a medical tax deduction based on my prescription to Sweden. And what about flexible spending accounts?

So nature prescriptions, while growing, remain largely symbolic. But, if my doctor just telling me to go for a walk in nature a few times a week, actually increases my doing so, imagine how much more effective that would be to get the instructions in a written prescription

Dr. Stryer cited a recent international YouGuv survey done for Visit Sweden in which most respondents had not heard about nature, prescriptions, but nearly two-thirds said they’d be open to following them if they received one.