Travel Sickness Relief Without Drugs?

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

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So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝Natural remedies for travel sickness / motion sickness that actually work?❞

First let’s take a brief moment to mention unnatural remedies!

Travel sickness medications are not only not all the same (i.e., they are different drugs from each other), but they’re not even all the same class of drugs, for example cinnarizine and promethazine hydrochloride are both antihistamines but work (as antihistamines) in mostly different ways, and scopolamine/ hyoscine hydrobromide (that’s one drug by two different names) is a muscarinic inhibitor (a muscarinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist) that blocks the signals in a third, entirely different way. There are other options too, but those are the most common ones.

We’re not going to recommend one over the others, but we are going to say: if one doesn’t work, you might want to try a different one to see if that works better for you. Our individual physiologies will tend to differ sufficiently that what works well for one person might not be what’s best for another.

Natural remedies

A lot of research in this regard has been done against nausea generally, and not necessarily against motion sickness specifically.

The reason for this is simple: it’s a lot easier to reliably induce other kinds of nausea in a laboratory setting, than it is to reliably induce motion sickness! Therefore, other kinds of nausea are easier to test remedies against.

That said, as a general rule of thumb things that are good against “nausea in general” are also good against nausea from motion sickness.

For example, ginger has been well-studied against nausea (mostly in pregnancy, chemotherapy, or post-operative nausea). If we try to find some of the science most relevant to your query, we find for example:

Clinical Evaluation of the Use of Ginger Extract in the Preventive Management of Motion Sickness

…pretty much concluded “sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t; who knows?”

Ginger for treating nausea and vomiting: an overview of systematic reviews and meta-analyses

…concluded (again, we paraphrase) “this consistently looks good, but the standard of evidence is low; we need better methodology to make declarative statements about it”

Meanwhile, here’s a much more specific, but also small (n=13) study that investigated ginger against motion sickness, and found:

❝Pretreatment with ginger (1,000 and 2,000 mg) reduced the nausea, tachygastria, and plasma vasopressin.

Ginger also prolonged the latency before nausea onset and shortened the recovery time after vection cessation.

Ginger effectively reduces nausea, tachygastric activity, and vasopressin release induced by circular vection.

In this manner, ginger may act as a novel agent in the prevention and treatment of motion sickness.❞

In other words: based on this tiny study at least, it works, but it’s not perfect. It delays the start of nausea, it makes the nausea less severe if it occurs, and it hastens recovery after nausea. It works by calming the stomach, and also by lowering levels of a hormone that is known to promote nausea.

Read in full: Effects of ginger on motion sickness and gastric slow-wave dysrhythmias induced by circular vection

Another natural approach is the use of acupressure, for which the most widely-used and well-researched (although again, most of the research has been for kinds of nausea other than motion sickness) is:

The Effect of Neiguan Point (P6) Acupressure With Wristband on Postoperative Nausea, Vomiting, and Comfort Level: A Randomized Controlled Study

This one’s particularly popular because it can be done with (as the study title there suggests) a wristband, which is more consistent than doing it yourself, and if you are the driver, does not require you to take your hands off the wheel.

There are other acupressure methods, but mostly less well-studied, for example: 7 Pressure Points for Nausea ← pop-science article with negligible hard science, but it has diagrams and instructions, which are helpful, even if you only go for the P6 point on the wrist, the one for which there is plenty of science!

Aside from those things, some general advice you probably already know but just in case:

• Have a light bite to eat before travelling (you don’t want to have just eaten a large meal necessarily, but you don’t want an empty stomach either which—counterintuitively—can make nausea worse)
• Stay hydrated (not overhydrated, but enough that you are definitely not dehydrated, which—counterintuitively again—can make nausea worse)
• Eyes front (best if you are driving, but even if you are a passenger, or in some vehicle that you can’t see out the front of, looking forwards is better than looking to the side)
• Ventilate (if possible; recirculated air is not as good as fresh air if available)
• Take breaks (if possible; this may be less of an option if in a plane or boat, for example)

Take care!