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Common practitioners at the moment are “prescribing” parkrun for his or her sufferers as a part of a social prescribing initiative to advertise preventive care. However in The BMJ, Dr. Margaret McCartney argues that turning parkrun right into a prescription medicalizes a stroll within the park and is a retrograde step.
Parkrun is an organized, timed, and free 5 km run, jog, stroll, or wheel on Saturday mornings—in parks, on seashores, or on trails around the globe, however primarily within the UK, the place it originated.
Parkrun has some paid workers, however the work of organising, timing, and end result processing is finished by native volunteer groups. Round 200,000 folks now participate every week.
“I love parkrun and believe that it can make a real difference to public health,” writes McCartney. However “prescribing”? Prescribing is for medicine which are, basically, deemed too harmful for the general public to have direct entry to. Are we actually meant to encourage folks to contemplate train in the identical area?
Turning parkrun right into a prescription makes it much less about pleasure and enjoyable, extra like work and compliance, she argues. “This approach doesn’t support patient autonomy or embedding social resources for a community. Instead, it grapples with gatekeeping and—literally—medicalizes a walk in the park.”
What’s extra, prescribing parkrun shouldn’t be, as some researchers have described it, a “simple, cost-effective solution for sustainability, improving well-being, reducing loneliness, and disease prevention.”
Whereas some folks might very very like it, get all of those benefits, frequently attend, and luxuriate in all the advantages that include socializing, contemporary air, and pleasant venues for train, McCartney factors out that 43% of people that register for parkrun do not attend, 22% take part solely as soon as, and individuals who describe themselves as bodily inactive are much less prone to return.
“I still go to parkrun. But partnerships risk commercial opportunism, and medicalizing exercise is a retrograde step. Resources should belong to the community, not to doctors,” she concludes.
Extra info:
Prescribing parkrun: medicalising a stroll within the park, The BMJ (2025). DOI: 10.1136/bmj.r670
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British Medical Journal
Quotation:
Prescribing parkrun is a retrograde step, argues physician (2025, April 8)
retrieved 8 April 2025
from https://medicalxpress.com/information/2025-04-parkrun-retrograde-doctor.html
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