Medical Hydrology and Balneology: Environmental Aspects

The State of the art, Health Resort Medicine in
Japan
Ohtsuka Y (1)
(1) Department of Human Developmental Science, Faculty of Education,
Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
yoshicat@med.hokudai.ac.jp
The area of Japan is about 378,000 km 2 , which is smaller than that of Spain and
a little larger than that of German. There are 27,671 hot spring resources and 3,185
hot spring regions providing accommodations. Total numbers of the guests who
stayed at hot spring regions were about 12,300,000, which is nearly equal to Japanese
population (from April 2010 to March 2011), and most of them visited there
just for fun but not for medical cure. Two notable features of hot spring waters in
Japan are 1) about 50% are over 42 ºC and 2) pH ranges from 1.2 to 11.3.
In Japan, health resort medicine dated back to Edo Era (17-18 century) as socalled
“Touji (hot-spring cure)” that was occasionally prescribed by some Kampo
(traditional Japanese medicine) doctors. Only this custom has continued to the
present days and many patients stay at hot spring regions for a couple of weeks
without any prescriptions from doctors. This is because application of medical
insurance is limited to the remedies based almost on western medicine and no
insurance is available for health resort medicine (i.e. balneotherapy). The Japanese
Society of Balneology, Climatology and Physical Medicine certifies the doctors as
medical specialists who can perform balneotherapy; however, they just give some
advice to the patients but not give them any prescriptions with a few exceptions,
because both doctors and patients never get any financial benefits. In some hospitals
at hot spring regions, hot spring water is used for rehabilitation of orthopedic patients
and those after cerebrovascular accidents by such as thermal therapy and/or
underwater exercise. In these cases, medical insurance can be applied based on
rehabilitation programs and /or physical medicine techniques.
In Japan, there were 6 main national institutions (or hot spring hospitals) affiliated
with national universities where many valuable researches were performed.
Nowadays, five of them were closed (reorganized) and the last one became limited
to the outpatient clinic only. Under this situation, research work trends toward to
health promotion activity using health resort medicine including natural resources
such as hot springs, forest environments, mountains, oceans and so on.
At present, unfortunately, health resort medicine is not officially recognized by
our government and very small number of medical students has a chance to learn
health resort medicine. Nevertheless, Japanese people like to visit hot spring re-
Balnea
2012, núm. 6, 51-52
51
ISBN: 978-84-669-1887-0
978-84-669-3482-4