Motion sickness may make travel really rough

Tue., May 23, 2006

Connie Midey The Arizona Republic

Smoothing a bumpy road

Choose the right foods, drinks

•Eat a light meal about two hours before travel, preferably something starchy.

•Avoid spicy foods, high-fat foods and alcohol.

•Try strong, bitter tastes such as plain tonic water. Some people vouch for green apples, limes, lemons and peppermint.

Choose the right position

•Sit in a well-ventilated area away from smokers.

•Look straight ahead, head still and eyes focused on the horizon or a distant, stationary object.

•In a car, volunteer to drive. Second best: Sit in the front passenger's seat.

•On a plane, sit over a wing.

•On a ship, reserve a cabin in the forward or middle of the ship and spend time on the upper deck.

•On a train, sit near the front, by a window.

Try natural remedies

•Press on the acupuncture point known as Neiguan, or P6. It's in the groove between the two tendons about three finger-widths below where your palm meets your wrist.

•Ginger tablets, available by mail order and in health-food stores and pharmacies, can prevent nausea. Or try ginger tea, ginger ale or candied ginger.

Sources: Scottsdale acupuncturist Laurie Perez of xin care (www.xincare.com),

Mayo Clinic and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Motion sickness has ruined March Madness for Dave Evans. Too many basketball players running madly up and down the court.

It has sent him reeling from movie theaters, made him outlaw ceiling fans and kept him out of car washes and off amusement park rides.

But his most miserable experience came on a scenic – or so he heard – bus tour around the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

“The driver allowed me to sit on the steps of the bus,” says Evans, 59, of Sun City West, Ariz. “Every time I was ready to unload my stomach, he’d stop the bus along the roadside and open the door for me.”

Evans stayed on the bus, with his wife, Carol, looking after him, at all the stops his fellow tourists enjoyed along the way.

“It was the worst eight hours of my life,” he says.

His physical reactions to movement are extreme, but his ailment is a common one, affecting as many as nine out of 10 people at some point, studies have found.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 60 percent of kids traveling in cars or airplanes and almost all travelers in rough seas, regardless of age, experience motion-related discomfort or nausea.

“Discomfort” is an understatement for what people like Evans suffer when the nausea center of their brain receives conflicting messages from the inner ears, eyes and sensory receptors about their body’s position in and movement through space.

Licensed acupuncturist Laurie Perez says she has “overcome the ‘green wave’ ” while traveling by planes, trains, automobiles, Indonesian ships and European ferries.

Perez, a professor at the Phoenix Institute of Herbal Medicine and Acupuncture, wards off motion sickness with Chinese medicine practices, including pressing her fingers on the anti-nausea Neiguan point on her inner wrist.

Sea-Band and similar wristbands with plastic buttons aligned to the Neiguan point work on the same principle.

Evans now takes a daily maintenance dose of prescription-strength meclizine hydrochloride, the antihistamine in over-the-counter motion-sickness medications such as Bonine and Dramamine.

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