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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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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