Medical Hydrology and Balneology: Environmental Aspects

Ultramicrofabric SEM-IA of peloids prepared
with mineral waters from Balneario de
Lanjarón (Granada, Spain)
Fernández-González M (1) , Martín J (1) , Delgado G (1) , Párrafa J (1) , Márquez R (2) ,
Delgado R (1)
(1) Departamento de Edafología y Química Agrícola, Facultad de Farmacia,
Universidad de Granada, Spain
(2) Centro de Instrumentación Científica. Facultad de Farmacia.
Universidad de Granada, Spain
mvirginiafernandez@ugr.es
Introduction and Objectives
The Pelotherapy (therapeutic use of medicinal muds or sludges) has been applied
for medicinal purposes since antiquity (Tateo et al., 2010) and is a topic of great
current scientific. The term \"peloid\" covers the natural products, therapeutic semiliquid
physical agents, consisting of the mixture of a mineral water, including sea
water and the salt lakes, with organic and inorganic material, result of geological or
biological processes or both and used in therapeutic form of plasters or baths (Sociedad
Internacional de Hidrología Médica, 1949)(Veniale et al.,2004.
The ultramicroscopic fabric (studied by scanning electron microscopy (SEM)
and image analysis (IA)) is a property very interesting of peloids, although precedents
found in the bibliography have been limited, due to the difficulty of pretreatment
processes. Vali and Bachmann (1988) relate the ultrastructure of the
colloidal dispersions of clay with rheological properties affecting the application of
peloids. Fabrics like a honeycomb of bees or reticulate increase the mud viscosity
or elasticity; both properties favourable to the handling and therapeutic application
of these materials on the skin. Our research group has pioneered this type of studies
(Gámiz et al., 2009), showing so far the dependence between the fabric and thermal
behaviour.
The aim of this work is to study the effect of maturation time and water type on
the ultramicrofabric (observed by SEM-IA) of artificial peloids.
Materials and Methods
The artificial peloids has been prepared using two types of mineral waters of
Balneario de Lanjarón (Granada), of the springs Salud V and El Salado, very similar
from the point of view of their classification and salinity (limited between 2 and
6 mg/l, respectively), keeping constant the mineral composition of the solid phase
Balnea 387
ISBN: 978-84-669-1887-0
978-84-669-3482-4
2012, núm. 6, 387-388