The role of forest therapy in promoting physical and mental health: a systematic review

Abstract

Forest therapy is a form of activity used to pursue health benefits from the forest. The term “forest therapy” is often used reciprocally with the terms “forest bathing” and “Shinrin Yoku”. Even with many studies on forest therapy, there remains scarce scientific evidence of a standardised method used in Forest Therapy caused by variations in such treatment programmes. This study aimed to analyse methods used in forest therapy from works of literature from 2017 to 2021. This literature was compiled using Publish or Perish, sorted using the Zotero programme, and visually clustered with the VosViewer programme. 393 research papers were sorted manually based on three criteria: they directly practised forest therapy or forest bathing and analysed its benefit on human health, which was written in English, and accessed online. The 29 items that fit our criteria were further synthesised. Synthesis of these works of literature resulted in the categorisation of methods used for FT intervention. FT methods used by researchers were forest walks, forest viewing, the combination of forest walks and viewing forest landscapes, therapy programmes involving five human senses, doing relaxing activities in the forest and traditional medicine-based therapy. On the other hand, there was also combined methods used. All of these methods benefitted human health. The limitation of this finding is the broad types of forest used for forest therapy. Further research is suggested regarding this matter.