Geochemistry of Groundwater Used in Balneotherapy and Spa Treatments

Dear Colleagues,

For a long time, groundwater has been used not only for drinking, personal hygiene and entertainment, but also in therapeutic treatments. Initially, its use in therapeutic treatments was connected with the use of waters from natural springs, especially thermal waters or waters with specific chemical or gaseous compositions, which were often believed to have “miraculous” properties. Subsequent studies have led to the discovery of the presence of components which are beneficial to human health in these waters, and these helped to explain numerous mechanisms of their activity. Following scientific and technological developments, groundwater used in therapy started to be obtained not only from natural springs, but also from deeper water intakes (dug wells), and, from the late 19th century on, also from boreholes. Nowadays, drilling methods are widely employed to exploit thermal waters and waters which are higher in total dissolved solids (mineral waters or saline waters), often from depths of up to several kilometers. Today, therapeutic treatments in thermal stations (health resorts) using groundwater draw on about 200 years of thermal medicine (balneology) experience, and recently also increasingly on the findings of clinical trials. To increase the understanding of the therapeutic activity of groundwater, there is a growing need for more comprehensive studies of the physico-chemical properties of groundwaters, including their gaseous composition, the presence of trace and ultra-trace elements, and the forms of the occurrence (speciation) of chemical elements in them. For this reason, we would like to dedicate this Special Issue of our journal Water to the broad subject of the geochemistry of groundwater used in therapeutic treatments, i.e., therapeutic (medicinal) water. We wish to include articles on a wide range of topics related to such waters. Our scope of interest comprises not only the origin of these waters, the development of their chemical and isotopic compositions, the mixing processes of different types of waters, and water–reservoir rock interactions, but also the physical and chemical processes providing these waters with features significant in terms of the effectiveness of therapeutic treatments. We also want to dedicate this Special Issue to the modern methods and techniques of analysing such waters. The Issue also offers some space for papers characterizing the hydrogeological structures containing therapeutic waters, and for studies of geochemical methods which are useful for prospecting new therapeutic groundwater resources. We also intend to provide foundations for up-to-date knowledge, based on modern research methods, on groundwater being the key resource for thermal medicine, and for the thriving usage of these waters in recreational and medical spas. We want to provide reliable information reflecting the current state of knowledge of the geochemistry of waters used in modern balneotherapy.

Dr. Tadeusz A. Przylibski
Dr. Dariusz Dobrzyński
Guest Editors

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• groundwater
• hydrogeochemistry
• mineral water
• thermal water
• therapeutic water
• radon water
• CO2-rich water
• saline water
• brine
• thermal station
• spa