For most sea faring citizens, the Hues Corporation 1974 hit, “Rock the Boat” is a melody musing to groove to. For those of us afflicted by motion sickness, rocking the boat can lead to a series of unsettling consequences. To those akin to kinetosis, the disagreement between visually preserved movement and vestibular system’s sense of motion, prolonged exposure to travel is a terror on their head and stomach. Battling motion sickness is the only way for these poor souls to survive if stranded on a cruise-liner or sailing trip. Here’s how.
To understand how to defeat this tragic condition, we must first understand it. The cause of motion sickness is an inability to synchronize sight with the feeling of motion. As a result, your body believes it is hallucination and acts to flush out what it believes is poison (vomiting ensues). Knowing this, the first way to battle against motion sickness is to fix your eyes on the horizon. Focusing on a distant point will help your sight to align with the motion you’re body is feeling and restore your sense of balance.
If the horizon isn’t helping, drinking the right liquid can help. Club Soda settles the stomach and electrolytes need to be replenished if you do vomit. If you’re too far gone already, a sleeping pill might be your only option. Either that or take a couple aspirin and ride it out.
If you are sea sickness prone, you should have a plan of attack in place before you step on that deck for the first time. Scopolamine patches act to avoid the nauseous feeling for up to three days at a time. Not comfortable with a chemical solution? There are such things as motion sickness bands which wear around your wrist and work using acupuncture techniques to send signals to the brain to stabilize. They are cheap, reusable and trial tested.
Motion sickness is the traveling man’s plague. Combating it is crucial to keeping your attitude towards boating a positive one. As shown, there are many ways to do this. In all scenario, however, having a paper bag at the ready to catch projectiles as they pile out of you is a must. It is always better to be prepared than not.
Tyler Baker; OSM Writer
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