Evidence for Spa Therapy: Studies on Construction of Knowledge in the Field of Hearth Tourism.

Spa therapy is one of the most commonly used non-pharmacological approaches for health or medical tourism, but its health effects are not completely known. From the point of view in construction of knowledge in the field of health tourism, author constructed the evidence-table of spa therapy. The procedure of selection of the spa therapy is as follows; excluded "Not humans" (n=445), "Not English or Japanese" (n=456), "Not Randomized Controlled Trial" (n=897), "Not spa therapy or balneotherapy" (n=61). Finally, 41 interventional studies were extracted from approximately 20 million papers. Furthermore, we conducted spa intervention study in Okinawa. The participants (22 women, 42.6 +/- 8.2 years) were randomly assigned into two groups, an intervention group receiving spa therapy tour in Okinawa, and a control group carrying out normal daily life in study period. This study observed a significant improvement of evaluated sleep parameters at the end of spa therapy tour in Okinawa. This is the first epidemiological study to estimate the spa health evidence and its effects among health tourism in Japa