Does Social Prescribing Work?

Over the last decade, a quiet but meaningful movement has been reshaping how we think about health and healing. It’s called social prescribing, and it started in an unlikely place—not Silicon Valley or Harvard Medical School, but the UK’s National Health Service.

The idea was simple and radical at the same time: Instead of only prescribing pills and procedures, doctors could prescribe community. Patients struggling with loneliness, depression, anxiety, or even chronic pain could be referred to a “link worker”—someone whose job was to connect them with local activities like walking groups, gardening clubs, book circles, or volunteer opportunities. It was a recognition that belonging, purpose, and connection are just as important to health as blood pressure and lab values.

It’s especially critical as we see, as a population, loneliness continuing to grow, especially in older populations.

I wrote about this emerging model in my book The Community Cure, and Julia Hotz has since added to the conversation with her powerful new book The Connection Cure. Both of us, in different ways, have documented the extraordinary potential of community as medicine.

But that brings us to the (perhaps) trillion-dollar question:

Does Social Prescribing Work?

The truth? We don’t really know.

Why? Because while social prescribing is incredibly promising, it's also notoriously hard to track.

• Did the patient attend the walking group you recommended?

• Did they make a new friend at the community center?

• Did they follow through on your advice to reconnect with an old friend or join a local class?

In most cases, the answer is… we don’t know. There’s no closed-loop system. Once the recommendation is made, the clinician or coach is left in the dark, and the system has no way of knowing whether the intervention happened—let alone whether it helped.

And in a data-driven era, what we can’t track, we can’t optimize.

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Social Prescribing Meets Precision Medicine with TruNeura

That’s why I’m so excited about what we’re building at TruNeura. Inside our platform, we’ve created a way to prescribe and track social connection just like you would a supplement or a lab test.

Our system is based on the eight pillars of health—and three of them are psychosocial:

• Connect

• Reflect

• Grow

These three pillars represent the often-overlooked but critical aspects of mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

With TruNeura, you can prescribe connection in a structured, trackable way. Here's how it works:

1. Choose a Connection Action
   From inside the platform, the clinician or coach can choose from a library of socially oriented recommendations—such as:

   • Call an old friend

   • Attend a group event

   • Volunteer in your community

   • Join a class or book club

   • Take a walk with a neighbor

   • Practice a gratitude-sharing exercise

2. Send the Recommendation
   The action is delivered directly to the patient’s app or dashboard, with a friendly reminder system that nudges them to follow through.

3. Track Compliance
   The patient can log whether they did the activity, or the data can be passively collected via wearable prompts or engagement inputs. The coach and clinician see this in real time.

4. Measure Impact
   Over time, we correlate adherence to these social prescriptions with changes in health outcomes—from sleep and HRV to cognitive scores and mood. That means we can finally quantify the effects of connection in the same way we’ve always tracked medication or blood sugar.

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The First Large-Scale Study of Its Kind

To our knowledge, this is the first system that will allow for large-scale, structured data collection on whether social prescribing truly works—and in which contexts. We’ll be able to ask:

• What types of connection are most effective for reversing cognitive decline?

• Do daily micro-interactions impact mood more than weekly group events?

• How does social engagement influence sleep, inflammation, or HRV?

In the near future, we may be able to confidently say, "Yes—prescribing connection works, and here’s exactly how to do it."

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Why This Matters Now

Cognitive decline is accelerating. Mental health struggles are surging. Loneliness has been declared a public health crisis. And yet, most of our interventions still revolve around individual behavior change—food, movement, sleep.

What if the missing ingredient isn’t just what we eat or how much we exercise, but who we’re doing it with?

Social prescribing is the bridge between lifestyle medicine and community healing, but until now, it’s been hard to measure and even harder to scale. With TruNeura, we’re finally able to close the loop and bring accountability and visibility to one of the most powerful, least utilized tools in healthcare: human connection.

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Conclusion: The Future of Healthcare is Human

In a world of labs, wearables, and AI, we can't forget that some of the most healing interventions are also the most human.

TruNeura isn’t just helping clinics practice functional medicine more efficiently—it’s helping them practice it more humanely. With our social prescribing tools built into the platform, we’re not just personalizing care—we’re re-humanizing it.

And soon, we’ll have the data to prove what so many of us already know deep down: connection heals.

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🔗 Learn more about how TruNeura is building the future of personalized, connected care
🔗 Listen to The Community Cure by James Maskell for FREE!
🔗 Check out The Connection Cure by Julia Hotz
🔗 Explore our blog on closing the loop for coaching