Mind power can beat seasickness

Photo / Supplied

It's an old joke: seasickness won't kill you, you just wish it would.

For those who do not suffer from its horrors, seasickness is often seen as something of a joke. For those afflicted, there is very little humour to be enjoyed.

Seasickness can be one of the most debilitating of illnesses. Those under its sway can be totally incapacitated and not only of no help to the rest of their crew but even a serious liability.

Our Kiwi folklore is littered with tales of strong blokes using mental strength and willpower to overcome apparently insurmountable pain or disability (think broken limbs, ripped scrotums and the like). Yet, as anyone who has suffered from serious seasickness will attest, no amount of willpower, positive mental attitude or "manning up" makes any difference when the dreaded "mal de mer" comes a-calling.

Ways of coping with the sickness are varied. They range from strong medications, through natural remedies (ginger is a popular favourite) to simply lying down in a cool cabin or getting up on deck in the fresh air and looking at that horizon.

One of our favourite tricks is to get the sufferer up on deck and keep them busy. Putting them behind the helm and giving them a course to steer seems to take their mind off feeling queasy and often effects a complete cure.

Keeping that mind occupied, or at least not actively engaged in making one feel worse, also appears to be at the heart of a new anti-motion sickness cure being developed by Nasa scientists.

Dr Patricia S. Cowings and Dr William B. Toscano from Nasa's Ames Research Centre have discovered that a regimen of "biofeedback training" is more effective than even the powerful anti-nausea drugs given to astronauts.

Apparently, 50 per cent of Nasa astronauts suffer from airsickness during spaceflight and, consequently, motion sickness has been a serious concern for some time.

The most famous case was in 1969 when all three Apollo 9 crewmembers had nausea. Incredibly, Rusty Schweickart still managed to go out in a spacesuit, even after repeated episodes of vomiting.

The obviously serious consequences of motion-sick astronauts have seen Nasa devote a lot of research time to finding a cure or a better way of coping with the problem.

The biofeedback technique discovered by Cowings and Toscano is one of the most promising yet. It involves potential sufferers learning to control their heart rate and sweating, principally using breathing techniques combined with high-tech biofeedback.

Those practising it mentally ramp up and bring down their physiological responses, actually lowering their heart rates and diminishing sweating; this, in turn, helps stop nausea.

While body functions such as sweating and increased heart rate are usually involuntary, the scientists say we can learn to control them with biofeedback training.

"We don't teach relaxation, we teach control. It improves with practice, like any other skill," says Cowings.

The scientists compared their technique (called Autogenic-Feedback Training Exercise or AFTE) with the standard Nasa treatment of an injection of promethazine (also known as Phenergan). They also used a control group that had no training or treatment.

The test showed that the AFTE group enjoyed dramatically better outcomes than even the group with the highest doses of promethazine.

Unfortunately AFTE is not yet publicly available but the scientists say just using their breathing technique can make a difference.

"If you're nauseated," says Cowings, "get your breathing smooth and even, with two seconds of inhalation and two seconds of exhalation.

"Breathe from low in your abdomen and keep that up as long as you can."

She also recommends relaxing the arms and legs and trying to warm up the hands, to increase blood flow.

While the AFTE technique might not work for all seasickness sufferers, it does have some distinct advantages.

"Of course, you can always knock yourself out with a pill like Dramamine if you don't mind drowsiness," says Cowings."However, AFTE has no side-effects and, once you learn, it lasts forever."