The current emphasis of Western medicine is on procedures that very often encourage the passivity of patients. Health insurance funds are incurring ever higher costs, which result directly or indirectly from this passivity. Of course, there is a mutual reinforcement of these factors and alternative approaches hardly get a look-in in this closed cycle.

And this although knowledge of the benefits of the activating approach in maintaining individual health is nothing new. And it is here that specific therapies in the Healing Forest make an invaluable contribution. At present, such methods are seriously neglected in German research funding. Forests have beneficial effects for many medical indications.

We "moderns" in the developed world see things in very rational terms – we have the impression that technology makes everything possible and that there is a technological solution for every problem. But due to this rationality, we have almost forgotten to ask ourselves more questions and find our own solutions. And we can find answers for a whole complex of half-forgotten questions in the forest, by the lake or in the mountains.

First scientific studies and findings on the application of forest therapy have produced amazing results. We have summarised a few examples here that make it particularly clear that the effect of the forest on health should not be underestimated.

The particular suitability of the Heringsdorf curative and healing forest has now been demonstrated in a controlled open pilot study with patients aged 40 to 80 years with COPD grades A to D (COPD is a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). The disease is characterised by an increasing disturbance of the airflow in the lungs (obstruction).