Research Trends on the Effects of Forest Therapy in Korea and Ways to Improve the Level of Medical Evidence: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Background and objective: Studies on the effects of forest therapy are clinical research that reveals the effects suitable for the purpose of therapy by applying a forest therapy program, which is a complex intervention, to humans in various forest environments. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to find out the characteristics of existing studies on the effects of forest therapy and to suggest ways to improve the level of evidence for future research results. In this study, a scoping review was conducted to find out how studies on the effects of forest therapy were conducted based on the medical clinical research method in domestic studies on the effects of forest therapy.Methods: The scoping review utilized a procedure proposed by the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI). A total of 564 studies were searched and 57 were used in the final analysis.Results: As a result of the analysis, only 1 study (1.8%) had a manual to reproduce the forest therapy program, and 56 studies (98.2%) reported only brief information on the program. As for the report on forest therapy environments, there were articles that mentioned some therapy environments, but none predicted the effects or reported about reproducibility. Among the reports on forest therapy environments, 21.1% reported about both forest and thermal environments, and 26.3% reported only about the forest environment.Conclusion: From the perspective of clinical research, the level of evidence for studies on the effects of forest therapy so far has been found to be very low, and methods for applying clinical research methods to improve this have been discussed. Clinical research is a prerequisite for verifying medical effects in order to raise the level of forest therapy from wellness to treatment support activities, and it must be actively utilized in the future.