Julia Hotz joins us in store at Kramers to discuss her new book The Connection Cure.

Traditionally, when we get sick, health care professionals ask, “What’s the matter with you?” But around the world, teams of doctors, nurses, therapists, and social workers have started to flip the script, asking, “What matters to you?” Instead of solely pharmaceutical prescriptions, they offer ‘social prescriptions’— referrals to community activities and resources, like photography classes, gardening groups, and volunteering gigs. Already popular in the UK, the social prescribing movement is gaining traction in the US, and solutions-focused journalist Julia Hotz has been covering social prescribing and related solutions for over five years in national outlets including the Boston Globe, the New York Times, TIME, and WIRED. During the pandemic, social prescribing became more personal for Hotz: Like many people trapped inside their homes, she started searching for holistic ways to help her mind and body, and started applying the ‘social prescriptions’ to her own life. In THE CONNECTION CURE, the first book on social prescribing, Hotz uses a combination of diligent science reporting, moving patient success stories, and surprising self-discovery to help readers find lasting and life-changing medicine in our own communities. Science shows that social prescribing is effective for treating symptoms of the modern world’s most common ailments: depression, ADHD, addiction, trauma, anxiety, chronic pain, dementia, diabetes, and loneliness. As healthcare’s de facto cycle of “diagnose-treat-repeat” reaches a breaking point, THE CONNECTION CURE offers a path to systemic change. Social prescribing has been proven to reduce patient wait times, lower hospitalization rates, save money, and reverse health worker burnout. And as a general sense of unwellness plagues more of us, social prescriptions can help us feel healthier than we’ve felt in years.