Forest Bathing with Dr. Suzanne Bartlett Hackenmiller: Rational Wellness Podcast 185
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Dr. Suzanne Bartlett Hackenmiller speaks about Forest Bathing with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
7:29 The difference between just spending some time in nature and forest bathing is that forest bathing is a mindful practice that involves spending time in nature in a more organized way. It’s similar to something like yoga or meditation where you have somebody guide you at first. The guide can increase and help to heighten the experience by guiding you through the various senses in a very prescribed, sequential way. Participants are invited to stand with eyes closed and they are guided to become more aware of their surroundings through by focusing on the sounds, what they feel, as well as what they see. The goal is to be able to really notice your surroundings and to have a heightened experience, instead of just passing through.
10:36 The benefits of forest bathing or shinrin yoku, as it is called in Japan, includes helping to manage mental health problems like depression and anxiety. Even getting our of the city and spending an hour in a forest has been shown to reduce anxiety and depression and improve self esteem. Forest bathing lowers blood pressure and heart rate and it improves heart rate variability. It has been shown to lower salivary cortisol and amylase levels, since it lowers the stress response.
15:05 Forest bathing improves metabolic and cardiovascular health. It also helps athletes to improve their performance.
19:45 There are chemicals called phytoncides that are naturally secreted by trees and plants and contained within essential oils to protect the plants from bacteria, viruses, and fungal infections. These can potentially have benefits for humans. These phytoncides are the inborn immune system of plants. We often refer to them as essential oils. When we come into contact with these phytoncides and breathe them in, they increase our natural killer cell number and activity. This can potentially help us in fighting viruses or cancer.
24:32 Myocbacterium Vaccae is a bacteria found in soil and researchers have found that when we’re outdoors we ingest little particles of soil and we consume some of this bacteria that is helpful for our memory, attention span, and our cognitive faculties in general.
Dr. Suzanne Bartlett Hackenmiller is a board certified medical doctor in both obstetrics and gynecology and integrative medicine and is board certified in herbal medicine with Dr. Tieraona Low Dog. Dr. Hackenmiller sees patients at the Van Diest Medical Center in Webster City, Iowa and she is an expert at forest bathing and wrote a book, The Outdoor Adventurers’s Guide to Forest Bathing. She is also a certified forest therapy guide and the medical director of the international Association of Nature and Forest Therapy. Her web site is IntegrativeInitiative.com.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations, including remote consults via video or phone, specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111 or go to www.drweitz.com. Phone or video consulting with Dr. Weitz is available.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates, and to like learn more, check out my website drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me, and let’s jump into the podcast.
Hello, Rational Wellness podcasters. Today, our topic is forest bathing and we’re here with Dr. Suzanne Bartlett Hackenmiller. Forest bathing is a concept developed by the Japanese, who call it shinrin yoku. It’s a guided, mindful experience in nature where participants are invited to explore their natural surroundings via sensory experiences. Research shows that such focused time spent in nature offers various health benefits, including reducing stress and cortisol levels, reducing anxiety and depression, improve natural killer cell activity and better immune system function, memory and cognitive function are improved. Blood pressure, heart rate, and even blood glucose levels are reduced, as are other indicators of heart health.
Dr. Suzanne Bartlett Hackenmiller is a board certified medical doctor in both obstetrics and gynecology and integrative medicine, and she’s board certified in herbal medicine with Dr. Tieraona Low Dog. Dr. Hackenmiller sees patients at the Van Diest Medical Center in Webster City, Iowa, and she’s an expert at forest bathing and she wrote a book, The Outdoor Adventures Guide to Forest Bathing. She is also a certified forest therapy guide and the medical director of the International Association of Nature & Forest Therapy. Dr. Hackenmiller, thank you so much for joining me.
Dr. Hackenmiller: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Weitz: Good. So, a little bit different than a typical topic we talk about.
Dr. Hackenmiller: I was going to say. This will be quite the experience for your listeners who are going, “What happened to him?”
Dr. Weitz: Right. Where is all the science about gut health and cardiovascular health?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Right. Yep, and it’s interesting because I talk with my patients about the science of gut health and all those things, too. So yeah, this seems a little tangential, but I promise we’ll bring it all back.
Dr. Weitz: There you go. So, before we get into this discussion of what is forest bathing, what some of the benefits are, how did you become interested in it and how do you integrate it into your medical practice?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah, thanks. Well, it’s kind of a circuitous story, honestly, but it just sort of happened. Largely, back in 2012, I had a husband who passed away from cancer. And so, I was dealing with life, and a practice of medicine, and dealing with some burnout and going through all of those kinds of things trying to raise two children, one of whom has special needs and dealing with my three stepchildren and their grief and going through all of those things. And I found that I started spending more and more time outdoors in nature. I was drawn to do that, which I think probably a number of people can relate to right now with the pandemic, because we’re hearing that park attendance is like 400 times what it used to be. So, that was what I ended up doing, and I found myself drawn to the more adventurous types of pursuits. I started mountain biking more and trail running, and started training to do adventure triathlons and things like that. And that was all really good, but I also recognized that I needed the balance of more of the mind-body type of thing, too. I’ve been a yoga practitioner for a number of years and had been prior to that, too, and so recognized that you can’t just have all the go, go, go, the adrenaline. That, of course, contributes to burnout just like it was in my practice of OB-GYN. So, I happened upon an article about forest bathing in 2014, and I, probably like many of your listeners, thought, “What’s forest bathing? What in the world is that?”
Dr. Weitz: Is that taking a shower in the forest?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah, exactly. And of course, when I started offering forest bathing here in about 2015, and that’s exactly what people were asking. “What? Now, is this clothing optional?” Or, “What are you doing in the forest?” I mean, believe me, people thought I was completely off my rocker, and they maybe still do, but that’s another story. So, I was really intrigued by this idea of forest bathing or shinrin-yoku, as you mentioned in the introduction. And so, I requested a little booklet on what forest bathing was from the Association of Nature & Forest Therapy, and from that booklet, I thought, “I’m going to experiment with this a little bit.” I was doing a weekly workshop series with a local retreat center and so I thought, “I’m just going to work this in.” And one of our weeks was on nature and health. We had spirituality and health, and community and health, and whole medical systems, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, all of those kinds of things. And so I thought, “Nature and health, let’s try that.”
And so, I experimented with the participants in this group and they loved it, and they came back the following week and many of them were reporting that they had this great experience. They went back out with their family or their friends or by themselves to forest bathe in the intervening week. And I thought, “Wow, there’s really something healing and medicinal and real about this.” And again, I was just kind of winging it and experimenting on these people. So after that, I started taking it a little bit more seriously, and as you mentioned in the intro, became certified as a forest therapy guide and ever since have been guiding my patients and general public on these forest therapy or forest bathing walks. It really has been something, I really have found that it is, in many cases, more healing than many of the other things that I offer, and I have a pretty large toolbox. I can offer my patients pharmaceutical drugs and surgery. I do a lot of herbal medicine, as you mentioned. I have all of these things that I can offer my patients. And yet, there’s something that really magical happens when you take people out into nature for a couple of hours.
Dr. Weitz: Are you practicing mainly as an OB-GYN or an internist or?
Dr. Hackenmiller: I do kind of a little bit of both, gynecology and integrative medicine, and that has waxed and waned over the course of the last several years. But yes, doing some of both and doing a lot more teaching and consulting and speaking and things like that about this topic of nature, also. So yeah, my practice has kind of expanded and contracted and changed over the years.
Dr. Weitz: So, what is the difference between forest bathing and just taking a hike or spending some time in nature? There’s something… there’s some structure attached to that.
Dr. Hackenmiller: There is, yeah. Well so, we know that any time spent in nature has health benefits, whether it’s sitting outside in nature or going for a walk in nature, and even the definition of nature depends on where you are. Nature could be a walk in a forest or a national park, but there’s also this concept of nearby nature where nature in your backyard or gazing at a tree from your balcony, or even maybe a potted plant, or maybe an indoor potted plant. We are nature and nature is everywhere, and it doesn’t have to be this far away grandiose thing. But that being said, so the difference really between just going out and doing your own thing in nature versus forest bathing is that forest bathing is actually a mindful practice. It’s similar to something like yoga or meditation where ideally you would have somebody guide you at first.
Most people wouldn’t just decide to teach themselves yoga and just start trying to figure it out. And so, we kind of liken forest bathing to that, where having a guide can certainly increase, heighten the experience that you have. And so forest bathing, the way it’s taught through the Association of Nature & Forest Therapy, and a number of other organizations now that have kind of followed suit, is the idea that you would go out with a guide and the guide would take you, typically a group but it can also be individually, and guide the participants to take nature in through the various senses in a very prescribed, sequential way. We talk about following this standard sequence, where we start with a certain, something we call the pleasure of presence, where we invite the participants, maybe even to stand with eyes closed, and we guide them through kind of a noticing of their surroundings going through the senses.
Noticing what they hear, noticing the way the air moves on their clothing, perhaps noticing with eyes closed the way something like a rock feels, or a leaf or a tree or water or something like that. And so, then we kind of go through what we refer to as a series of invitations, where the participants are invited to try these different ways to notice nature. A typical forest bathing walk will take place over the course of two or three hours, which seems like a really, really long time, but it typically goes pretty quickly, and we move very slowly. So, it’s not a hoofing it hike for exercise, it’s not a nature identification walk, it’s really just a way to slowly kind of sink in and notice the surroundings.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. So, let’s go into some of the benefits. So, in what ways does forest bathing reduce our stress and have benefits for our mental health?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah. Well, the doctors who coined the term shinrin-yoku in Japan, doctors Li and Miyazaki started the practice in the early 1980s. Just thinking that perhaps getting people out of the city and the chaos of Tokyo where mental health problems were skyrocketing, suicide incidents were high-
Dr. Weitz: It’s interesting when you think about Japan, because we all think of Japan as just being so many people crowded in together and even living quarters being so tiny that people are living in cubicles. So, it’s interesting that there actually is a fair amount of natural areas there.
Dr. Hackenmiller: Right. Yeah, so these doctors then took their patients out of the city, about an hour outside the city to a forest, just wondering if getting them out of the chaos and the noise and the lights and the stress of the city would be helpful for their mental health. And so, they started doing some questionnaires on their participants before and after these excursions to see how things like anxiety and depression and self-esteem, and all of those things changed, or whether they did, and they found that consistently they did improve after time spent in this kind of contemplative, quiet, mindful way in nature. So then, these doctors continued to study their participants, both in terms of their mental health and also physical health and found that things like blood pressure would improve and heart rate variability and that type of thing. Now fast forward to today, studies are being done on things like salivary cortisol and salivary alpha amylase. These are hormones that they can measure in the saliva of their participants and they’ve found that those things improve after forest bathing.
Dr. Weitz: What did they see on the cortisol?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah. A recent study, I believe it was 2019, found that 20 minutes of walking in nature, now this particular study was not specific to forest bathing, but they compared walking in nature versus walking in an urban setting for 20 minutes, and they found that there was statistically significant improvement in salivary amylase and salivary cortisol after 20 minutes of walking in nature versus walking in an urban area.
Dr. Weitz: So, what did they see in terms of the cortisol? Did they see it go up, go down, normalize, or?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Oh, I’m sorry, they found that it went down. So, they found that it improved. People were showing less of a stress response in just 20 minutes of being in nature.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. So, these were people who were seeing some excessive rise in cortisol at some point during the day other than in the morning?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Right, right, yep. Yeah, and if your listeners are interested, I can certainly forward you any of these studies and you can pass those.
Dr. Weitz: By the way, salivary amylase levels, that’s not something I’ve heard talked about very much.
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah, right. It’s not something that you hear about much, but it’s something that has been associated with the stress response, and it’s something that’s fairly simple and fairly inexpensive, as far as I understand, that people can measure just from a swab of the saliva in the mouth.
Dr. Weitz: So, now amylase is a digestive enzyme, right?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Right, yeah.
Dr. Weitz: That correlates with stress?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah, isn’t that interesting? And especially if you do a lot of GI talk, yeah. I would be interested to hear from an endocrinologist more about that, because it’s not something that there’s a lot, to my knowledge, written about. But yeah, so that can be your next guest. I can even connect you with one.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, really? Because most endocrinologists I know pretty much dismiss salivary cortisol measurements.
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah, I can connect you with an integrative endocrinologist, Low Dog.
Dr. Weitz: Good, good, good. So, talk about how forest bathing improves cardiovascular and even metabolic health?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah. Well, they have found that blood pressure and pulse improve and heart rate variability. I don’t know if you’re familiar with things like heart math, I’m guessing you probably have some experience with that and your listeners maybe do too, so this idea that when we’re under stress we have less variability between each individual heartbeat, and that that is a marker of stress and can correlate with all kinds of different parameters of our health. And so, they’ve found that spending time in nature improves that heart rate variability, again the blood pressure and pulse, and all of those kinds of things have been found to be improved.
Dr. Weitz: Interesting. We use heart rate variability among other reasons to monitor recovery from exercise sessions. So, for professional athletes, if they could get improvements in heart rate variability they could potentially improve their performance. Has there been any looking at forest bathing for helping athletes?
Dr. Hackenmiller: I don’t believe there are specific studies for that, but it’s something I’m really interested in. And in fact, in my book, that was one of the things that I wanted to look at so I reached out to a number of elite athletes in different areas of people who their particular sport is an outdoor nature based thing, whether it was trail runners or kayakers or mountain bikers and people like that, who aren’t just road cyclists or people who run marathons on pavement. People who for some reason are drawn to outdoor pursuits. And so, I asked all these athletes if there was something about being a nature that they felt contributed to their success in their sport. And they all did. And so, it was fun to hear the responses of these different elite athletes, as far as they maybe couldn’t put their finger on it, but there was something about being in nature that heightens their performance as opposed to, like I said, some kind of pavement type of sport.
This is something that I’ve explored a lot, the idea of kind of forest bathing while you are doing your outdoor sport. And again, that was kind of the tenant of my book, The Outdoor Adventurer’s Guide to Forest Bathing, how can we combine these two things that I love? Because I do still love the adrenaline rush of the outdoor adventure, but was there some way that we could kind of marry the two and derive the benefits of both simultaneously? So, I personally find that when I’m trail running or mountain biking or hating my life going up a hill or something, climbing on a mountain bike is not my favorite, but you have to pay to play as we always say. And so, there are those times where you’re hating life going up a hill. And so, I do find myself trying to incorporate some of these ideas of forest bathing while I’m doing that. I might tell myself, “Okay, while you’re climbing this hill, just start noticing the sounds around you.” And so, I’ll tune into the sounds of birds or the sounds of the wind or something like that, or I’ll pay attention to what I’m smelling, the fragrances, the pine or whatever, or I’ll decide some little visual game. I’ll tell myself to look for a certain color or I’ll pay attention just to the dark hues. And I find that when I kind of play these mental mindful games, it does help me. And when I was interviewing these different athletes for my book, they all reported similar kinds of things that they do. So, I found that really interesting. It hasn’t maybe been studied yet, but I think it’s a great area for study.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, it’s interesting. I could see how maybe attaching a basketball hoop to a tree and playing one-on-one against a grizzly bear would really increase your quickness.
Dr. Hackenmiller: I think you’re absolutely right. That would be slightly off topic of improving heart rate variability and all, but-
Dr. Weitz: I’ve been known to get slightly off topic. Can you talk about the chemicals that are naturally secreted by trees and plants called phytoncides, that means protect the plants from bacteria, viruses, fungal infections, and potentially have some benefits for humans?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Definitely. I think this is something that is so, so fascinating. So, plants and trees emit these chemicals, as you just said, called phytoncides, and they’re chemicals that are contained within the essential oils of plants. We know that evergreen plants especially have higher concentrations of these phytoncides. And for the plant, for the tree, these phytoncides offer protective benefits. They help the tree, the plant, whatever, fight against fungi, bacteria, viruses, and help them against inflammation. So, they’re kind of their own inborn immune system. And so, what they have found is that when we, as humans, spend time in nature, and when we are inhaling the aromas of the essential oils, so if you’re smelling that fragrance of pine or juniper or something like that, you’re inhaling the essential oils and you’re also inhaling the phytoncides. And they’ve discovered that we as humans benefit from inhaling the phytoncides in the same way that the plant benefits from them. And they’ve found that phytoncides help humans in fighting these various microbes, cell viruses, bacteria, fungus, and also have anti-inflammatory effects for us. So, isn’t that amazing?
Dr. Weitz: That is amazing. So, would oregano oil, would that be somehow included in this?
Dr. Hackenmiller: It very well could be. I’m not an expert in essential oils or aroma therapy. I’ve actually tried to reach out to some various experts to try to kind of hone in more on this idea of, so what exactly are the phytoncides? And believe me, I’ve asked, including Dr. Lee in Japan, this question. I have tried to grill him about it because some of his work is what I’ll refer to next, but this idea of what is the phytoncide? Is it the essential oil or is it the constituents of the essential oil, the terpenes and all of those different constituents? So yes, we know that oregano has a lot of anti-inflammatory properties as do a number of other things, turmeric and ginger and definitely oregano. And so, is it phytoncides? Is that part of what it is?
These are all these questions that keep me up at night asking. So, I assume that’s what Dr. Lee’s studies have found though on the phytoncides also, and there’s evidence that by coming into contact and breathing in these phytoncides that they increase our natural killer or NK cells in number and level of activity in the body. And so, NK cells sweep around our bloodstream finding abnormal things like viruses and bacteria and gobbling them up. And they also locate tumor cells in the body and destroy them before they can replicate and divide and become a cancer.
And so, just to think that possibly inhaling the fragrances of trees allow us to breathe in these phytoncides. They found that when people forest bathed in Japan, and this was a study that looked at a two night three day forest bathing excursion, so that’s longer than your typical one, but that might be similar to a weekend camping trip, they found that when people did that, that their NK cell levels rose both in number and level of activity a day later. And then, when they rechecked seven days later, they remained elevated in both number of natural killer cells and how active they were and they found that that benefit was maintained for 30 days out.
Dr. Weitz: Cool.
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah, I mean to me, that’s amazing. So, just to think that spending a weekend out in nature gives you health benefits in terms of fighting cancer and fighting viruses for up to 30 days out.
Dr. Weitz: Amazing.
Dr. Hackenmiller: That’s remarkable I think, yeah.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. What is mycobacterium vaccae and how does this help with brain health?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah, it’s a bacteria that is found in soil and researchers have found that when we’re outdoors we ingest little particles of soil, so we’re swallowing little particles and we’re also inhaling them. And they found that when-
Dr. Weitz: And by the way, soil contains lots of bacteria, there’s huge fungal networks, and so there’s a lot of reasons why soil and being in nature has a stimulus for the immune system and going all the way back to just having your kids play in dirt as opposed to-
Dr. Hackenmiller: Absolutely. Oh, so true. So, they found that when they exposed mice to this bacteria that they were able to navigate a maze two times faster than the ones that were not exposed to that bacteria. So yeah, they’re finding increasingly that it is helpful for our memory and our attention span and just cognition in general. So, being out in nature and being exposed to dirt and plants and all that good stuff is good for our mental health and our memory and all kinds of things.
Dr. Weitz: Now, you also talked in your book about how forest bathing is typically concluded with the tea ceremony, which is a good time to reflect and to pay respect to nature and the ancestral humans who might have tended to the land before us. So, can you talk about that?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah. Well, so since this practice stems from a Japanese concept, it, we do that when we add the tea ceremony as part of what we consider the standard sequence. And so, it is really nice to do that and exactly what you just said, a time of reflection for the people who are in the group. If we can, if it’s safe and legal to do so, we like to use a plant that is in the area and create a tea from that. If not, we’ll bring loose leaf tea and make our tea that way. I find that participants really, really love the tea ceremony as much as anything. I think it’s just this idea of getting back to kind of a deep ancestral knowing that the plants in our midst are, they’re not poisonous, obviously there are some that are and you absolutely must a hundred percent know what you’re doing if you’re foraging and consuming any plants out in nature.
So, that’s my caveat there, but this notion that… You could make a tea from dandelion, something that probably most people are able to easily identify and that doing so is safe and has a number of different health benefits and is not gross. When people actually try these little teas that we make they’re astonished that, “Oh, that’s actually really good.” It seems pretty woo-woo when you think about it, but I’ve gotten all kinds of people to try the tea ceremony and to try forest bathing, and pretty much consistently people are amazed at the experience. I do like to bring in some of that herbal medicine to our tea ceremonies and talk about the properties of whatever it is. And again, people are just astonished that there would be health benefits from something as simple as dandelion tea.
Dr. Weitz: Now, how can people access somebody to help them with a forest bathing experience and are there apps or other ways to do it if they can’t find a guide?
Dr. Hackenmiller: That’s great, yeah. Well, my book has a number of invitations that a person could just go out and try on their own. It’s also available on audio book, which I really wanted to have happen so that somebody could be out there and listen, kind of like listening to a guided meditation. So, that would be one way. There are guides all over the world now who are trained by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy, and so there’s an interactive map where a person could find a guide and that’s at natureandforesttherapy.org. And there are other organizations of forest bathing and forest therapy guides in addition to that organization.
And yeah, I think there are some people who are working on apps and things like that. I think, especially during this pandemic, we’ve been forced to try to figure out kind of virtual ways to do forest bathing without congregating, as with everybody trying to figure that out. So, I’ve offered some virtual walks and there is a whole list on that website of virtual walks. So, you could be at your own local woods or in your backyard even. I did one one time and the lady was in her backyard. It was like, great, why not? So, there are ways of accessing it.
Dr. Weitz: Great. That’s good that they can use the audio version of your book to guide them through and they could be walking in nature, they could be bicycling, they could be on a boat rowing. Right? What is some of the different ones?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah. So, my husband and I guide workshops that incorporate all these different things. Sometimes in the morning we’ll do a hike and incorporate forest bathing. And then in the afternoon, we’ll have lunch then we’ll do a kayaking forest bathing. So literally, we’ll each be in our kayaks and I’ll give an invitation, people will paddle out and kind of do their own thing. And then, we’ll circle back up and kind of discuss what we noticed and go back out. I mean, I’ve really enjoyed kind of adapting, taking the concept of forest bathing and adapting them to some of these other activities. In my book, I talked about hiking and trail running and mountain biking, cross country skiing, climbing, I think I’m forgetting something but, there must be one other that I’m blanking on. Anyway, there are six different ones in the book, just ways that you can incorporate a little forest therapy into all of those activities.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great. How can listeners and viewers… So, we’re going to be wrapping up here, any final thoughts you want to leave with the viewers and listeners?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Well, I’m always happy to interact with listeners and if they’re interested, they’re certainly welcome to find me on my little website, which is integrativeinitiative.com. I always love to hear feedback on the book and different ways people have used it. So, that’s very fun. I will also share that through the organization, Parker RX America, some other physicians and researchers and I just completed creating a webinar that incorporates all kinds of the most up-to-date studies on nature and health. This one hour webinar is free for anybody to watch. Physicians and healthcare professionals are able to get continuing medical education if that interests them from it. But that’s all available on the parkrxamerica.org website.
Dr. Weitz: So, what is that? Parker X?
Dr. Hackenmiller: Park RX, as in park prescription.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, okay.
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah. And that’s another whole conversation, but if people are really interested in some of these studies that we just briefly alluded to, they’re all included in that webinar.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great. Good, okay. So, thank you Dr. Hackenmiller.
Dr. Hackenmiller: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Weitz: And your book is available through Amazon?
Dr. Hackenmiller: It is. So, it’s The Outdoor Adventurer’s Guide to Forest Bathing and it’s available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and in a number of brick and mortar stores, and available through the publisher, which is Falcon Guides.
Dr. Weitz: Awesome.
Dr. Hackenmiller: Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: Great, thank you.
Dr. Hackenmiller: Thank you so much.
