Prescribing parkrun is a retrograde step, argues doctor

Normal 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 all over the world, however primarily within the UK, the place it originated.

Parkrun has some paid employees, however the work of organising, timing, and outcome processing is completed by native volunteer groups. Round 200,000 individuals now participate every week.

“I like parkrun and consider that it might make an actual distinction to public well being,” writes McCartney. However “prescribing”? Prescribing is for medicine which might be, usually, deemed too harmful for the general public to have direct entry to. Are we actually meant to encourage individuals 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 method would not assist affected person autonomy or embedding social sources for a neighborhood. As a substitute, it grapples with gatekeeping and—actually—medicalizes a stroll within the park.”

What’s extra, prescribing parkrun isn’t, as some researchers have described it, a “easy, cost-effective resolution for sustainability, bettering well-being, decreasing loneliness, and illness prevention.”

Whereas some individuals could very very similar to it, get all of those benefits, usually attend, and revel in all the advantages that include socializing, recent 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 more likely to return.

The Royal Faculty of Normal Practitioners’ approval for “prescribing” parkrun is also thought of catnip to industrial sponsors, she provides. For instance, the Promoting Requirements Authority beforehand advised Healthspan, a vitamin provider, to vary its well being claims after parkrun included one in every of their adverts of their publication.

“I nonetheless go to parkrun. However partnerships threat industrial opportunism, and medicalizing train is a retrograde step. Sources ought to belong to the neighborhood, to not docs,” she concludes.