Episode #53. Movement, Medicine, and Muddy Hands: The Gardening GP’s Lifestyle Medicine Mission with Susan Taheri
What if one of the answers to better health wasn’t more medication… but more mud under your nails?
In this episode of Make Movement Matter, I talk to Susan Taheri, a rural GP who turned her growing frustration with the healthcare system into something living and healing - a garden. Not a metaphorical one. A real, community garden next to her practice in Devon, where patients can reconnect, move more, and experience a different kind of care.
We chat about why she built the garden from scratch, how movement sneaks into every part of gardening, and what happens when doctors start meeting patients outside and connecting in the open air.
Chapters
02:58 The Journey of a GP: Before the Garden
05:50 Recognizing Burnout and Compassion Fatigue
08:48 The Birth of the Growing Well Garden
11:54 Building Community Through Gardening
14:54 The Role of Social Prescribing
18:05 Transforming Patient Relationships in the Garden
32:23 Movement and Mobility in Gardening
37:06 Adapting Gardening for All Abilities
40:11 Building Confidence Through Gardening
43:26 Community Gardens and Health Initiatives
46:22 Grassroots Solutions in Healthcare
About this week’s guest:
Dr Susan Taheri
Growing Well Garden is a Green Social Prescribing project based at Bow Medical Practice in Devon. Green Social Prescribing helps people to engage in nature based interventions and activities to improve their mental wellbeing as well as their physical health and to overcome social isolation.
The garden was the idea of Dr Susan Taheri, an NHS GP for over twenty years who also holds a Diploma of Lifestyle Medicine and is interested in the ideas around “what makes us healthy”.
Having recognised the value of gardening for her own health, she was keen to find a way of sharing this. She was also curious to know how things might be different if she had the opportunity to meet her patients in a garden, rather than in a consulting room.
Connect here:
Website: https://growingwellgarden.co.uk
Instagram: @the_gardening_gp and @growingwellgarden
Resources:
Gardening4Health website: https://gardening4health.co.uk/
The Gardener’s World episode: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024919
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More about your host, Wendy
Wendy (50) founded Reclaim Movement after a running injury at 40 turned into 4 years of chronic pain. In her search for answers and to reclaim her own movement again she discovered natural movement. The philosophy of training real life practical movements to be able to keep using them as we age, coupled with the benefit of using strengthening and mobilising whole-body movement patterns that are underused in today’s modern world made her realise she had found a way to move for life.
Wendy’s aim is to help people embrace a movement-rich life, at any age, to improve mobility, strength and confidence to keep moving well and doing the things they love for as long as they want.
MovNat Level 1 certified & Functional Range Conditioning certified, she coaches online group classes live & by replay in the Reclaim Movement membership as well as online and in-person private coaching in Oxford.
Find out more about Reclaim Movement:
Instagram: https://instagram.com/reclaim.movement
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@reclaim.movement
Facebook: https://facebook.com/reclaim.movement
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