Natural Treatments for Air and Motion Sickness

There are various homoeopathic treatments for motion sickness that you might consider using as an alternative to the medical drugs highlighted earlier. After all if they are good enough for the royal family they are good enough for me!
The most common of these homoeopathic treatments are as follows:
Cocculus Indicus: This is probably the most common homoeopathic remedy for motion sickness, especially for sufferers who experience nausea which gets worse when they see or smell food. It is common for Cocculus to be given to travelers who commonly feel weak and experience a hollow or empty feeling in their stomach as a result of suffering airsickness. This is a remedy that is also very well suited to people whose condition is made worse by feeling cold, from moving about or from a lack of sleep.
Rhus Toxicodendron: Is probably better known by the more common name poison ivy but fortunately, in very small doses, it is not going to kill you! However, what it can do for anyone whose airsickness usually exhibits itself through nausea and vomiting (whilst there is also a lack of appetite at the same time) is help calm their condition down.
Often people who suffer these kinds of symptoms will feel weak and lightheaded because there is a distinct lack of nutrition inside them, so they might feel dizzy when standing. Sometime this feeling will be accompanied by an intense headache and your child might feel like their 'hair hurts!'
Tabacum: This solution would be a suitable homoeopathic remedy for anyone whose airsickness is most commonly identified by them feeling nauseous and faint, with a green tinge or extremely pale color to their skin. Most commonly, these obvious symptoms would be accompanied by a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach and possibly a severe headache that feels as if there is a very tight band wrapped around the head.
There are also a number of herbs that can help motion sickness and air sickness. Many studies have indicated that ginger appears to be more effective than a placebo in reducing the adverse effects of motion sickness. For example, in one study, a group who were given ginger extracts reported significant reduction in nausea, vomiting and cold sweating when compared with the control group who were taking a placebo.
Therefore dosing your kid or yourself up with ginger capsules before and during your flight might help to reduce the severity of the motion sickness problem if it does not get rid of it completely.
A combination of peppermint and black horehound has been used by some herbalists as an effective method of treating nausea, so whilst it is not specifically used as a treatment for motion sickness, it can certainly offset some of the worst effects of having your kid or yourself feel violently ill on a plane.

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Why Kids (and Adults) Get Motion Sickness

There is nothing worse than having a sick kid in the back of your car except for maybe having a sick kid on a train or a plane.
All forms of motion sickness happen because there is a lack of balance between the information being fed to the brain by the three parts of the human body where motion is sensed being the eyes, the inner ear and the body. In the labyrinth or inner ear, motion sickness has an adverse effect on your normal sense of equilibrium and balance hence your spatial orientation is also adversely affected.
As an example, when your motion is voluntary (if you are walking or running for instance) the messages being sent to your brain by all three points of reference tie together as what your eye is seeing and your body and vestibular system (the inner ear) are feeling are all in agreement with one another.
However, when the motion is involuntary such as when you are in a plane going through an area of turbulence or on a ship that is rolling in heavy seas, what your eyes are telling your brain and what you are feeling are in direct conflict with one another.
All forms of motion sickness are more likely to occur when complex involuntary movements are involved, with both horizontal and vertical movement together being far more likely to cause airsickness than one or the other on their own. The kind of turbulence that is most often experienced in a plane generally involves up-and-down as well side to side movement, hence the susceptibility of many people to air sickness in turbulent conditions
Although the exact causes of the airsickness are not fully understood, it is generally believed that the imbalance between the messages being sent to the brain from various different parts of the body causes problems with various different neurotransmitters. These are naturally produced chemicals that enable the transmission of ‘signals' throughout the brain and nervous system.
It is believed that an imbalance of neurotransmitters like histamine and norepinephrine is the most likely cause of motion sickness, hence the fact that many medicines that ‘treat' motion sickness contain these particular neurotransmitters which you take in an effort to restore neurotransmitter balance.
The most common symptoms of suffering air sickness are nausea which often leads to vomiting, loss of appetite, cold sweats and pallid skin, lack of concentration, vertigo, headache and increased tiredness.
The good news is that for most people (both adults and children), airsickness is not a serious condition whilst it is one that is likely to cease affecting you once the motion that causes it ceases as well. In the next blog I will explain what the doctors can do for motion sickness.

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