Hydrotherapy: Exploring the Healing Effects of Water

in recent years, hydrotherapy has been increasingly paid attention to and many studies have been done on this regard. Therefore, a health care provider especially nurses should know the increasing models of such treatment for a holistic care. The aim of present study was to investigate prevalence of hydrotherapy, causes of using hydrotherapy and users ’satisfaction among outpatients in Kerman.

this was a descriptive-analytic study. 453 subjects participated in the study using convenience sampling method. To collect the information, a demographic form and a researcher-made questionnaire for studying the usage of hydrotherapy, clinical complaints leading to using this treatment and satisfaction of the user, was used. The questionnaire had sufficient validity and reliability.

prevalence of hydrotherapy was 12.8% in previous year. The most common clinical symptoms leading to use this treatment were pain in knee (37.9%) and backache (27.6%). The highest frequency related to the satisfaction belonged to the item "good feeling after treatment" (91.5%).

this study showed that hydrotherapy has been used mostly by users with musculoskeletal pain and good feeling after treatment has been the most important therapeutic outcome resulting in more satisfaction of users.