11/14/2023

Adaptive Sports Nonprofit Helps Vets Find Community Through Climbing

Paradox Sports offers adaptive rock and ice climbing experiences

Adaptive sports have proven to be a catalyst for establishing community among veterans with service-connected disabilities. Such activities, especially those conducted in outdoor spaces, offer mental and physical health benefits that can yield drastic improvements to a veteran’s quality of life.

So pronounced are the perks of outdoors immersion that many doctors in Canada have even gone as far as prescribing passes for Parks Canada — the equivalent of U.S. National Parks — alongside select medical treatments. And in the U.S., medical professionals like Dr. Nooshin Razani of University of California San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital have gone as far as monitoring “time spent outside nearly as much as... patients’ pulse, weight and blood pressure,” Razani said in a PBS News Hour report.

“If you take an urban adult into a forest, within 15 minutes, you see improvements in cortisol, blood pressure [and] heart rate,” Razani added. “But more convincing to me is the fact that people who live in green areas live longer.”

Please select this link to read the complete article from the Military Times.