Water and health: A forgotten connection?

Abstract

There are frequent and doom-laden messages concerning impending water shortages but the consequential negative effects on the availability of waters for healing and the factors underlying the decline in the use of water therapies in some parts of the world are ignored. This article reviews the evidence for the medicinal uses of water, past and present, showing how ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Celtic and Hebrew societies all used water for medicinal purposes, sometimes in conjunction with herbal medicine. Water treatments consisted of hydrotherapy (techniques of therapeutic bathing and use of water), balneotherapy (therapeutic bathing in medicinal and thermal springs) and thalassotherapy (the therapeutic use of ocean bathing and marine products) and these treatments continue to be used to the present day although their use in the Anglo-Saxon world is diminised. Factors in this decline are the lack of research funding and the availability of allopathic medicine. In ancient society, the factors underlying the efficacious healing properties of water may have been ignored and its benefits instead attributed to divine sources. Latterday science, however, from the 19th century to the present, has isolated those factors in water that have health-giving properties.