Wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Family of Oak Mountain Outdoor Healthcare!
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“Health doesn’t begin in a clinic. It begins in relationship: with your body, your environment, and the rhythms that remind you how to be human.”
Health is not a discrete outcome produced through episodic clinical encounters. It is an emergent property of relational, biological, and ecological systems. Dominant biomedical models have historically conceptualized health as the absence of disease, emphasizing diagnosis, intervention, and symptom management within clinical settings (Engel, 1977). While these approaches have yielded important advances, they often inadequately address the complex, interdependent factors that shape chronic disease, mental health, and long-term well-being.
A relational view of health aligns with biopsychosocial and systems-based frameworks, which recognize that physiological functioning is inseparable from psychological regulation, social context, and environmental exposure (Engel, 1977; McEwen & Stellar, 1993). From this perspective, health emerges through attunement; an individual’s capacity to perceive and respond adaptively to internal bodily signals, external environmental cues, and relational dynamics. Interoceptive awareness, for example, plays a critical role in emotional regulation, stress response, and behavioral decision-making, all of which influence chronic disease trajectories (Craig, 2002).
The highlights the ecological nature of human health. Humans evolved in close relationship with natural environments, and growing evidence demonstrates that environmental context significantly shapes neurobiological, cardiovascular, metabolic, and immune functioning. Exposure to natural settings has been associated with reductions in stress biomarkers, improvements in mood and cognition, and enhanced autonomic nervous system balance (Ulrich et al., 1991; Bratman et al., 2019). Conversely, environments characterized by chronic stress and sensory deprivation can dysregulate physiological systems and contribute to disease progression (McEwen, 1998).
Central to this reflection is the concept of rhythm circadian, seasonal, social, and behavioral. Disruptions in circadian rhythms are strongly linked to metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disease, mood disorders, and impaired immune function (Czeisler, 1995; Walker, 2017). Modern healthcare systems, which often operate independently of patients’ lived rhythms, may unintentionally exacerbate dysregulation by prioritizing efficiency over alignment with human biology. Restoring rhythmicity through sleep regularity, movement, time outdoors, and relational consistency can therefore be understood as a foundational health intervention; an adjunctive lifestyle recommendation.
This perspective challenges transactional models of healthcare delivery that prioritize volume, procedures, and short-term outcomes over sustained relational and environmental engagement. When care models acknowledge patients as embedded within biological, relational, and ecological systems, they move closer to addressing root causes rather than downstream manifestations of illness.
Oak Mountain Outdoor Healthcare articulates a paradigm shift: health is not manufactured within clinics but cultivated through relationships and systems that reconnect individuals to their bodies, their environments, and the rhythms that support human regulation and resilience. Our framework offers a compelling foundation for prevention-oriented, value-based, and environment-integrated approaches to healthcare that are better suited to addressing the complex challenges of chronic disease and population health.
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Beach, M. C., Inui, T., & Relationship-Centered Care Research Network. (2006). Relationship-centered care: A constructive reframing. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 21(S1), S3–S8. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1525-1497.2006.00302.x
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Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn894
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Engel, G. L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196(4286), 129–136. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.847460
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840(1), 33–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1998.tb09546.x
McEwen, B. S., & Stellar, E. (1993). Stress and the individual: Mechanisms leading to disease. Archives of Internal Medicine, 153(18), 2093–2101.
Ulrich, R. S., Simons, R. F., Losito, B. D., Fiorito, E., Miles, M. A., & Zelson, M. (1991). Stress recovery during exposure to natural and urban environments. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 11(3), 201–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(05)80184-7