Who Are Paediatric Speleo Therapy Patients?
Who Are Paediatric Speleo Therapy Patients?

Author(s): Dana Hübelová , Jarmila Überhuberová, Alice Kozumplíková, Jan Caha
Subject(s): Applied Geography, Health and medicine and law
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: health; speleo therapy; asthma; geographic structure; Moravian Karst;
Summary/Abstract: Speleo therapy is a climatic therapy method using the specific cave climate as a natural source for complementary treatment of asthmatic patients reducing their complex pharmaceutical therapy to minimum. The purpose of this contribution is to present the socio-demographic profile of the patients attending speleo therapy in the Paediatric Sanatorium with Speleo Therapy at Ostrov u Macochy, and define their regional distribution across the Czech Republic. The patient profile is based on data of randomly selected (733) patients of the Paediatric Sanatorium with Speleo Therapy at Ostrov u Macochy (by descriptive statistics and graphic visualisation of data). The profile shows prevalence of boy (58.9%) over girl (41.1%) patients, in the most common age group of 5–10 and under repeated therapy in nearly half of the sample cases (48.3%). The most frequent diagnoses include bronchial asthma, recurrent respiratory infections and exercise induced asthma and a considerable part of the patients also suffer from various forms of allergies (74.4%). A prevailing majority of the children shows improvement of their health condition after a speleo therapy session cycle (95.5%) with recommended repetition of the therapy (98.9%). The geographic structure of the patients attending the sanatorium shows prevailing patient recruitment from South Moravia, Moravian Silesia, South Bohemia, Central Bohemia, Vysočina and Prague regions. The results demonstrate the importance of speleo therapy for improving the health of patients.

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