Spa treatment : selection of patients and the choice of a suitable spa / by Neville Wood.

  • Wood, Neville.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Spa treatment : selection of patients and the choice of a suitable spa / by Neville Wood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    47/68 (page 43)
    These measures no doubt allay inflammation, while the massage also employed promotes circulation in the vasa vasorum. Whether for this latter purpose mechanical vibrations are also used, as in other French spas, does not appear from the published descrip- tions of the treatment. French physicians, we are told, “ think of phlebitis only to couple it with the name of Bagnoles.” The Gallic predilection for these neat formulae of expression is so great that it has doubt- less long been productive of a supply of cases so abundant that the physicians of the place have attained the proficiency of ex- perience in the employment of its special remedies. Thus a treatment of perhaps somewhat fanciful origin may develop ulti- mately into one of the greatest practical utility. Such has been the evolution of many successful balneological methods. The practical lesson to be drawn is that when a spa has long maintained a reputation for the treatment of a given disorder, its medical men will probably be expert in dealing with that dis- order whether or not the waters are of real therapeutic potency. Some inadequacy of the springs may even serve as a stimulus to their professional sponsors. Thus, some time ago, at a spa famed for the speedy cure of rheumatism I found prescribed a drug which was then unknown in London. The addition to the waters of salts and even of drugs entirely foreign to them is a curious feature of the treatment at Bath, for such frank jogging of Nature’s elbow is regarded at most other spas with strong disfavour. Concerning the action of waters of very low mineralisation, the so-called indifferent waters, there is still much controversy Writers at a distance from the spas, as might be expected, are disposed to compare them with tap-water. On the other hand those who are under the necessity of employing them grasp, for explanation of the high therapeutic potency with which they credit these waters, at the latest theory, now that of potentisation y ionic dissociation. That ionisation places these weak waters m a position of superiority to the stronger ones is not a tenable proposition, for in the stronger the sum of the dissociated ions is