抄録
Kusazu Hot Springs are, in general, of acid alum vitriol waters with pH 1.6. There has been (several generations since) a peculiar custom of taking bath called “Jikan-yu” in Japanese, meaning “time-limit bath”—a traditionally well-known method of applying a spa treatment for some chronic diseases. This is the way that patients take a highly hot bath at 47°C., for 3 minutes, four times a day, and keeping it on for weeks, so that at the end of a week or more they may come to have an “acid spring dermatitis” (“Tadare” of spring bath) around the groins and axillae.
Professors Misawa and Oshima with other investigators tried to find their explanation in taking it a stimulant alterative treatment acting effective for some chronic diseases.
We reported, in our preceding papers, on the mucoprotein levels in normal as well as in pathological human sera. Here we have studied the effect of the “time-limit bath” upon the serum mucoprotein level by means of Winzler's method, and at the same time, upon the erythrocyte sedimentation rate and the total serum protein content.
The results of the said high-temperature spring-bath applied on 14 male and 2 female patients were as follows:
(1) There was a rise of the serum mucoprotein levels in most of them, keeping with the the progress of the acid spring dermatitis, while falling again as the inflammation turns to recede.
(2) The erythrocyte sedimentation rate also increased as the dermatitis progressed.
(3) Nine out of them showed, however, no remarkable change in the amount of the total serum protein even after the appearance of the dermatitis.
