How medi spas are attempting to bridge the gap between medical health and emotional wellness
What’s the first thing that springs to your mind when you think of a spa? Is it being cocooned in a luxurious dressing gown while you’re pampered, preened, and primped? Is it enjoying healthy food, being mindful, resting, and doing some gentle yoga? Is it escaping with your mum, partner, or best friends for some quality time? Or is it taking off for a solo weekend, simply to check in with yourself and to see if you are meeting your own needs?
Whatever it is, there’s a good chance your thoughts will revolve around rejuvenation and restoration, feeling treated, and boosting your mental and emotional wellbeing. There is an equally good chance that they won’t revolve around heart monitoring, MRI scans, tests for blood pressure, or any other treatments of the medical variety.
There’s not a spa in existence that doesn’t promise restfulness and indulgence of mind and body, but interestingly, over recent years, increasing numbers of health resorts have started offering diagnosis as the first of many steps they’re planning to take towards providing far more rounded healthcare.
Jacinta, senior associate director at a leading PR company, has witnessed this at first hand, having seen spas add medical facilities and employ medics, or partner with hospitals and diagnostic specialists to add allopathic treatments to their services.
‘This has certainly been an interesting development over the past decade or so,’ – Jacinta says.
‘Before, medical spas such as the Mayr Clinics and Chenot stood apart from resorts whose primary purpose was pampering and beauty. More recently, however, we have been seeing the emergence of facilities that are trying to bridge the two.’
This shift seems to have been driven by a desire for a more holistic approach to health, from both clients and the industry itself. A Global Wellness Institute webinar on spas post-pandemic has predicted that visitors will continue to seek resorts that offer hospital-grade sanitation, and treatments that boost the immune system and improve cardiovascular function.
‘I do think there’s growing recognition that staying well entails addressing one’s health issues from a range of different perspectives,’ says Jacinta. ‘It requires, among other things, spiritual and emotional exploration, the right nutrition, regular exercise, learning from Chinese and Western medicine, and conventional and complementary treatment.
‘We need to look after our minds, our bodies, our guts, our immune and respiratory systems, and our hormones. Health requires maintaining balance, which is why a holistic approach to wellbeing will become more relevant. ‘This is what many medi spas are aiming to offer.
Chiva-Som in Thailand, Lefay in Italy, and Atmantan in India, for example, are pioneering integrative therapy programs, but there are others that have gone way beyond that, with the expertise to give treatments you’d expect to receive in a hospital.’
‘The purpose of a medical spa is to support patients as they adopt a healthier lifestyle, and seek to address the warning signs their bodies are giving them’ NAZIR SACOOR
The Longevity Health & Wellness Hotel, in Portugal, has borrowed elements from its medical cousins. Nazir Sacoor, CEO and founder of Longevity Wellness Worldwide, says the company, which also owns other hotels, has ‘diagnostic medicine in its DNA’, but stresses that its spas are there to complement rather than stand in place of hospitals.
‘I want to be clear from the outset that people who are ill, living with serious health conditions, or who have had major physical traumas need to be seen by clinicians in hospitals,’ he says. ‘We have a major role to play in a person’s health regime … but there is a line we cannot cross.’
The purpose of a medical spa is to support patients as they adopt a healthier lifestyle, and seek to address the warning signs their bodies are giving them. In essence, their purpose is two-fold, says Nazir. ‘Our aim is to prevent disease, with programs that promote ultimate health and provide regenerative therapies, and to offer early detection and diagnosis of a number of conditions. This would hopefully prompt people to take appropriate medical action.’
Longevity’s menu includes treatment for diabetes, screening for skin cancer and, for those aged 45 and over, a thorough cardio examination using advanced imaging that detects the earliest signs of coronary heart disease. Such progressive facilities indicate not only that these spas are bridging the gap between being pampered for beauty and prodded for health, but also that they’re hoping to provide treatments for people who find themselves in the space between being well and being unwell. By using such sophisticated diagnostic equipment, and creating tailored exercise and diet plans geared towards detecting and fixing the first signs of illness, they hope to prevent disease from taking hold.
‘That is a key aspect of the treatments we offer,’ says Nazir. ‘We’re all about prevention. The daily pressures of life, pollution, radiation, poor eating, inadequate exercise regimes, can have a huge effect on our bodies and minds. They can cause chronic inflammation, which can, in turn, trigger critical illness. ‘Medical spas such as ours have created programs that repair. By restoring balance, strengthening the body from the inside out and boosting immunity, we aim to stop potential illnesses from developing.’
THE ORIGINS OF SPAS
The ancient Greeks, living in 2000 BCE, were among the first in the West to popularise bathing, and they certainly expected more from it than cleanliness. Natural springs and pools were ritualised by mythology and imbued with the divine power to heal. After all, this was where the gods were thought to frolic, which put cleanliness right next to godliness and hygiene right next to healing.
Where there was purification of mind, body, and soul, it only took hope, initially, and then observation to find remedy. Hippocrates (460–370 BCE), the great Greek physician widely considered to be the father of medicine, even advocated taking daily aromatic baths and scented massages for good health, thereby perhaps unwittingly prescribing one of the earliest spa treatments.
The Romans, considered some of the greatest bath-builders of all, played an even bigger role in the evolution of the spa by setting up public thermae or balneae across Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. Bathing for health and relaxation gathered its own momentum and over the centuries, towns by the sea or with natural springs attracted people who would now be called health tourists, and became resorts. One of them – Spa, in Belgium – has even been credited with giving us the noun in the early years of the 14th century.
Over time, the services offered by the resorts became more elaborate. Steam rooms, healthy menus, exercise classes, and beauty rooms were added and people began to visit in ever growing numbers. By the 1830s, one of the most popular US tourist destinations was Saratoga Springs in New York. And then in 1910, Elizabeth Arden changed the spa industry forever, when she opened the Red Door Salon, also in New York – effectively the first ever day spa.
