Suggestion of non-medical treatment shifts focus from, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ to ‘What matters to you?’
When a Toronto doctor sent out a tweet earlier this year of the prescription she’d just handed to a patient, she had no idea the impact it would have.
“Puppy of choice,” it said, “with walks twice daily and lots of love.” It was a real prescription, written on her prescription pad, handed to a patient experiencing feelings of loneliness.
Thousands of people liked it, shared it and left their own comments, many asking if they could be Dr. Iris Gorfinkel’s patient, too. In the end, it reached more than 700,000 people.
“I think the reason that it struck such a raw chord is because people saw themselves in it,” Gorfinkel said.
The family doctor, who’s been practising for more than 20 years, says she’s been doing some form of what’s now known as social prescribing since her earliest working days — suggesting non-medical treatments for patients who come to her with symptoms that suggest loneliness or isolation.
Anyone can benefit
By having physicians or other care providers refer people with non-medical symptoms to non-medical services available in the community, the hope is to ease some of the burden on the overstretched health-care system.
“Social prescribing can be used for anyone,” said Kate Mulligan, an assistant professor at Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health who spearheaded one of Canada’s first formal hubs for social prescribing.
But she says it’s particularly helpful for people from communities facing health inequities and need support in accessing anything that impacts the social determinants of health — non-medical factors that influence health outcomes — such as loneliness or isolation, housing, income or discrimination.
One of the groups most open and ready for social prescribing in Canada is seniors, says Mulligan. “Isolation has huge impacts on their well-being and those impacts can be pretty immediate and pretty significant and hard to bounce back from at times.”
