Spas For Your Health

In the earliest times, spa meant either a place where you drank water for you health or a place where you went and bathed yourself, again for your health and relaxation.

Taking the waters in the seventeenth century could either have involved drinking some quite vile tasting stuff as it bubbled out of the ground - once you have tasted the waters at Bath in England, you will never forget it - or wallowing in water in one of many different ways. An early German text book on spas suggests that there are over 300 ways to take a spa, some of them involving some very odd positions and odder practices such as being blasted by a high pressure hose.

An 18th-century advertisement for the waters at Bath in England proclaims that they can cure 'forgetfulness, the pox, lethargies, the scratch, rhumes and weakness of any member'.

Nowadays it is generally agreed that spa means a place where you can bathe and relax and have a massage and generally indulge yourself. And come out feeling a much better being. The British International Spa Association, in their newsletter of Spring 2002, defines a spa as 'a place where therapeutic treatments are given using healing waters'. Which is a good working definition.

There has always been a lot of anecdotal evidence that spa treatments are especially good for musculo-skeletal problems, including arthritis and backache but also for metabolic and digestive disorders.

Plainly, it is understood that a session in a spa and a massage will help relieve stress and anxiety, especially if your mobile phone is in the dressing room, but has anyone proved that it does anything else? Is there evidence that a spa is good for you, does improve your well-being. For a long time it was all anecdotal evidence.

The Greeks and the Romans had a civilization almost built around the bath. In Japan, the hot bath and massage has a great and long tradition. In Europe the spa, probably named after the German town of Spa which, yes, has spa baths, has been popular as a cure for what ails you for centuries.

Even in Britain, where bathing was never considered a social essential, in the 18th century there were 200 mineral springs and healing wells and spas throughout the country. Most closed over the last century, although the habit of bathing in public baths remained in place until about 1950.

Now spas are coming back all over the world. And a spa and a massage is a great and wonderful and relaxing experience.

But is it good for you? Will it help a healing process? Will it relieve problems?

Very little research was done. It was taken for granted. Then, according to Gerhard Strauss-Blasche at the University of Vienna, Austria, in the 1960s scientific literature on spa therapy began appearing mainly in German scientific journals. But there was activity in other places as well.

The Dead Sea has often been named as an ideal spa. The Israeli Journal of Medical Science has an article which refers to ten years of controlled studies which have 'demonstrated that treatments provided at the Dead Sea have a positive effect on patients with inflammatory arthritis such as rheumatoid and psoriatic arthritis, and on non-inflammatory arthritis such as osteoarthritis.' It was found that even Dead Sea salts dissolved in regular bath water were effective to a degree, 'although to a lesser degree than when applied at the Dead Sea area itself.'

Then a group of Italian scientists found a link between the therapeutic application of thermal mud and subsequent increased beta-endorphin and decreased stress hormone levels, suggesting a possibility that reduction of inflammation and pain could result in lowered stress. Other studies have shown improvement of lower back pain with effects sometimes lasting up to a full year.

Gerhard Strauss-Blasche and his associates have recently published three articles. The first examined the overall effects of spa therapy on well-being, gives us a basic understanding of the traditional European spa approach. The other two projects looked at the contribution of individual spa therapies in the reduction of chronic pain.

In the first article on well-being, which came out in 2000, the team wrote that spa therapy could be considered a medical approach for treatment of non life-threatening chronic disorders.

They also pointed out, "Next to the treatment of the specific disorder, the second generally acknowledged aim of spa therapy is to increase and sustain well-being. Study results indicated an immediate and significant general improvement in physical and emotional well-being from beginning to end of a spa treatment. Although the study refers to a stay of more than a week at a spa it came to the conclusion that 'spa therapy may be a powerful tool in enhancing well-being in progressed middle-aged adults with common health ailments."

The reports state that just being in the spa environment, away from the stresses of normal life, is likely to have therapeutic effect.

Which is why we go to spas.