motion sickness treatment.

Why Do I Get Motion Sick So Easily?

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A senior man feeling dizzy and touching his head

Risk factors for motion sickness include being a child, taking certain medications, sinus congestion, sinus infection, ear infection, recent concussion, migraines, pregnancy, and being female.

Motion sickness is a type of dizziness that occurs in response to real or perceived motion, and can cause gastrointestinal and nervous system symptoms.

Motion sickness results from an imbalance between what you see and what you feel. For example, a car moves forward while your body remains still. This imbalance causes the symptoms of motion sickness. 

Some people get motion sickness more easily than others. Factors that can predispose you to motion sickness include: 

What Are Symptoms of Motion Sickness?

Symptoms of motion sickness include: 

  • Nausea
  • Feeling unwell (malaise)
  • Vomiting (may be severe)
  • A feeling of warmth
  • Dizziness
  • Belching
  • Increased salivation
  • Headache
  • Sweating
  • Irritability 
  • Pale skin (pallor)
  • Hyperventilation
    • Shortness of breath
    • Numbness and tingling
    • Feelings of impending doom

How to Cure Motion Sickness

Symptoms of motion sickness usually go away when the motion stops. 

Once symptoms of motion sickness begin, treatments include: 

  • Environmental modification
    • Lay down when you feel sick
    • Drink plenty of water
  • Switch seats if you are not already in the most favorable seat to reduce motion sickness
  • Get plenty of air 
  • Complementary and alternative treatments to treat and prevent motion sickness include:
    • Ginger
      • Suck on hard ginger candies 
      • Take 1 to 2 grams of ginger orally
    • Apply acupressure bands to both wrists (may be worn in anticipation of symptoms but also after symptoms have started)
  • Medications to both treat and prevent motion sickness

Motion Sickness

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CDC recommends making sure you are up to date with your COVID-19 vaccines before travel, which includes additional doses for individuals who are immunocompromised or booster doses when eligible. Follow all requirements and recommendations at each location during travel, including wearing a well-fitting mask and following recommendations for protecting yourself and others. If you are traveling internationally, check the COVID-19 Travel Health Notice for your destination and visit the International Travel webpage for requirements and recommendations.

woman in a mask sleeping on a plane

Motion sickness happens when the movement you see is different from what your inner ear senses. This can cause dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. You can get motion sick in a car, or on a train, airplane, boat, or amusement park ride. Motion sickness can make traveling unpleasant, but there are strategies to prevent and treat it.

Preventing motion sickness without medicine

Avoiding situations that cause motion sickness is the best way to prevent it, but that is not always possible when you are traveling. The following strategies can help you avoid or lessen motion sickness.

  • Sit in the front of a car or bus.
  • Choose a window seat on flights and trains.
  • If possible, try lying down, shutting your eyes, sleeping, or looking at the horizon.
  • Stay hydrated by drinking water. Limit alcoholic and caffeinated beverages.
  • Eat small amounts of food frequently.
  • Avoid smoking. Even stopping for a short period of time helps.
  • Try and distract yourself with activities, such as listening to music.
  • Use flavored lozenges, such as ginger candy.

Using medicines for motion sickness

Medicines can be used to prevent or treat motion sickness, although many of them cause drowsiness. Talk to a healthcare professional to decide if you should take medicines for motion sickness. Commonly used medicines are diphenhydramine (Benadryl), dimenhydrinate (Dramamine), and scopolamine.

Special Consideration for Children

family in airport

Motion sickness is more common in children ages 2 to 12 years old.

Some medicines used to prevent or treat motion sickness are not recommended for children. Talk to your healthcare professional about medicines and correct dosing of medicines for motion sickness for children. Only give the recommended dosage.

Although motion sickness medicines can make people sleepy, it can have the opposite effect for some children, causing them to be very active. Ask your doctor if you should give your child a test dose before traveling.

Scientists have developed a “highly effective” motion sickness treatment.

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It could soon be safe for people with sea sickness to go back on the water, thanks to a new treatment that uses electrical currents to help calm down your brain’s response to too much motion.

The treatment involves attaching electrodes to your head, which then painlessly stimulate your brain using gentle electrical currents. Right now this requires a portable machine, but in the future researchers hope to downsize the whole thing into a mobile app, with electrodes that plug into the headphone jack.

“We are confident that within five to 10 years people will be able to walk into the chemist and buy an anti-seasickness device,” lead researcher Qadeer Arshad from University College London in the UK said in a press release. “It may be something like a tens machine that is used for back pain. We hope it might even integrate with a mobile phone, which would be able to deliver the small amount of electricity required via the headphone jack. In either case, you would temporarily attach small electrodes to your scalp before travelling – on a cross channel ferry, for example.”

Scientists have been struggling for decades to find a way to effectively treat motion sickness, a condition that describes the symptoms of severe nausea, cold sweats, and dizziness that plague people when they travel by boats, plane, car, or any other moving vehicles.

One of the main obstacles is that scientists still don’t really understand what causes the condition. The best explanation we have is that the brain receives confusing messages from our eyes and ears while we’re moving, and somehow that triggers the symptoms which plague so many people.

And while we now have several effective drugs to treat the condition, the best available also come with side effects such as drowsiness, which isn’t ideal for people who need to work on boats or planes.

The new treatment instead uses electrical currents to stimulate the region of the brain responsible for processing motion signals, with the aim of dampening its responses. This is the same technique that’s been found to be effective at boosting concentration, aiding memory, and even making people more creative.

The team tested the technique out on 20 adults who already had motion sickness. All of them had electrodes attached to their head for 15 minutes before being strapped into a moving chair designed to trigger motion sickness – but only half of them were actually given the treatment, the rest experienced a placebo.

At the end of their motion sickness chair ride, those who’d been given the proper treatment all experienced less nausea and recovered more quickly than the placebo group (who we can’t help but feel bad for). The results have been published in Neurology.

“We are really excited about the potential of this new treatment to provide an effective measure to prevent motion sickness with no apparent side effects,” said Michael Gresty, a world leader on motion sickness from University College London who collaborated on the study. “The benefits that we saw are very close to the effects we see with the best travel sickness medications available.”

We can’t even begin to imagine how awesome it would be to be able to enjoy boat trips and long car rides without nausea, simply by plugging a few electrodes into our iPhones before travel. Bring it on.