How Doctors Treat Motion Sickness

Sometimes it is impossible to do anything about your kid's motion sickness problem. It just will simply require medical treatment and that is that (unless you want to resort to some kind of expensive surgery on the inner ear.)
There are quite a few over-the-counter medical treatments for air sickness almost all of which should be taken or used at least a few hours before flying.
Some of these are antihistamines such as meclizine (Bonine, Antivert and Postafen being three very common brands), diphenhydramine (Benadryl or Dimedrol outside the USA and Canada) and belladonna in the form of scopolamine.
Meclizine is a known antiemetic (anti-nausea) and antispasmodic (it prevents muscle spasms) medicine that can be bought over-the-counter in most pharmacies and drugstores. It is believed that meclizine helps to reduce the likely susceptibility to nausea and vomiting by reducing activity in the part of the brain which controls nausea. The main side effect of this drug is drowsiness but dry mouth is also common.
Benadryl is used as an antihistamine, antiemetic, hypnotic and sedative drug. This drug is in fact one of the oldest known antihistamines, having been discovered in 1943, but it is still readily used and prescribed (although it can be bought over the counter) in many countries of the world.
Once again, the most common side-effect of taking diphenhydramine is profound drosiness, sometimes accompanied by ataxia, dry throat and mouth, flushed skin, irregular or rapid heartbeat, blurred vision, short-term memory loss and constipation.
Scopolomine is a drug that has valid medical uses only in extremely tiny doses, as an overdose can cause delusions, deliriums, stupor and death! it is most commonly used in the form of an infused patch that will usually contain as little as 330 µg (micrograms) of the drug. This is affixed to the skin – usually behind the ear – around 3-4 hours before flying so that the drug can be released by the patch to be gradually absorbed through the skin. To tell you the truth I am not wild about giving this drug to kids!
That is why in the next blog I am going to give you some more natural remedies for air sickness and motion sickness that are not going to cause miserable side effects. As suggested, most of the common over-the-counter medical products designed to deal with airsickness do have potentially unpleasant or even dangerous side-effects. Hence, you need to carefully weigh up the possibility of suffering these side effects before deciding whether taking drugs to calm your kid's right for you or not.

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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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