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Treatment spas

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It is possible to differentiate four basic principles of therapeutic procedures in medicine:
  1. Stimulation (natural treatment method)
  2. Substitution – pharmacology and dietetics
  3. Directive approach (pharmacology)
  4. Eliminative approaches (surgery)   

It should be clear that these procedures should be employed in the order in which they are presented above, i.e. priority should be given to the stimulation of the patient’s own capacity to stabilize his own health condition.
However, the specialization of medicine over the past few decades has led to a preference for procedures 3 and 4, naturally under pressure from pharmaceutical firms and market economic principles.

Clinical medicine

  • is primarily focussed on influencing health problems (through pharmacological or operative means)
  • can, however, elicit a whole range of undesirable side effects throughout the entire organism

Balneology – spa medicine
is a typical holistic treatment method that

  • influences the organism as a whole
  • activates the patient's own adaptive mechanisms to establish homeostasis
  • takes advantage of the patient’s entire physiological biological reserves to aid recovery
  • has no undesirable side effects

For centuries the spa industry has used natural therapeutic resources and their effects on the organism through physical, chemical, and thermal stimuli, both external and internal.
These natural resources include mineral springs, gasses (especially inert gasses), peat material, and climatic conditions. Modern spas use additional integrated scientific methods such as the application of physical factors, physiotherapy, diet therapy, regime measures, health education, and elements of minor psychotherapy.

These create a place for spa therapy in contemporary medicine:
Balneology is a branch of secondary prevention that

  • maintains the remission of chronic disease
  • arrests the onset of remission
  • trains the adaptive reserves of the body
  • motivated patients to take an active approach to the disease

The stimulation of the patient's own capabilities to stabilize his own health condition should have top priority and it is actually spa treatment (though many people don’t want to admit this fact) that takes maximum advantage of the body’s auto-regulatory abilities and its adaptation range. This range is a living organism and because it is not permanent it is necessary to continually maintain this system in an alert condition. Auto-regulatory abilities that are not trained will quickly become exhausted and fail during over-exertion and stress. And failure means disease.
A highly important factor is individual indication of physical stimuli, whether from natural sources or other components of comprehensive treatment, the maintenance of the time complex, and the sum of stimuli and individual approaches. A danger for the spa industry resides in efforts by spas to treat everything, i.e. in the violation of the individualization of treatment.
It is absolutely necessary that all principles of modern balneology be respected, personnel must be highly trained, from medical employees to physiotherapists and other workers, and attention must also be paid to perhaps the greatest thing currently missing from balneology – regulated research.  

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