Evaluating the literature of therapeutic landscapes with an emphasis on the search for the dimensions of health: A systematic review

Abstract

Health geography emphasizes landscape capacity as a perspective for examining health dimensions. Much of this emphasis is on the concept of therapeutic landscapes. In the last two decades, changes in the therapeutic landscapes concerning health, as well as why and how the development of the emphasis on the dimensions of the health in the landscape in proportion to the temporal-spatial course of literature in this field can be considered. The framework of the present study is based on a systematic review of therapeutic landscapes in the geography of health in the last two decades. This systematic literature review followed the PRISMA guidelines. Searching for “Therapeutic Landscapes” term at Science Direct and PubMed, screening, 56 eligible articles were selected in the journal Social Science and Medicine, and Health and Place. The results of the systematic review, aiming to search for the health dimensions of the therapeutic landscape, and recognize main gaps, identified three main issues: scale and range of users of therapeutic landscapes, the position importance of experiences in therapeutic landscapes, therapeutic landscapes as the holistic paradigm. The results of the research show that in recent years, attention to multiple dimensions of health, especially non-physical relationships of therapeutic landscapes and multiple dimensions of health, has been considered more and more by researchers. Personal-social perceptions and experiences are also continually evolving, so the concept of therapeutic landscapes and its relationship to health is considered living and dynamic.

Keywords: Therapeutic landscapes, Health geography, Well-being, Systematic review