To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video You might have experienced that with anti-allergy medication. Unfortunately, though, antihistamines are known for making you tired. That trigger mechanism is the one that makes you throw up when things get shaky. "Those meds are antihistamines, which suppress a certain trigger mechanism in our brain," says Schönfeld. That's less of a problem during a long-haul flight, but inconvenient if you plan on sight-seeing after a half-hour car ride. Some more, some less, but you're never 100 percent there. I now take travel medication whenever my itinerary includes potentially risky trips by airplane, ship or in automobiles ― trains are actually fine for me.īut there's a downside with these anti-motion-sickness pills: They make you drowsy. Hormonal changes play a role, too, which is why kinetosis is particularly likely to hit youth going through puberty and women who are pregnant, or menstruating. For reasons still unknown to scientists, people of an Asian background are thought to get travel sick more often than others. Some estimates suggest that around 30 percent of the world's population experiences symptoms of kinetosis at least once in their lives. Most people who have it are born with it." "Some people are extremely sensitive to it, others not at all. "It's like with sunburn," Schönfeld explains. Rush-hour traffic in Delhi is a challenge for anyone prone to motion sickness Image: Getty Images/AFP/M. In Egypt, I baffled a guide by being the first person he had ever taken on a Red Sea snorkeling tour who got motion sick during the actual snorkeling. ![]() But they, and it would seem you too, were wrong. You might have thought that wasn't possible, like my travel companions who made me the designated switchback driver for that very reason. On a Germany vacation, it was Bavaria's winding mountain roads that made me nauseous ― and I was driving the car myself. There's hardly a country I've visited where I haven't felt the bile rise in my throat. And yet: The experience in India was just the most recent entry in a long line of unpleasant travel memories. These two competing pieces of information are referred to as a "sensory conflict." And that's what pushes your balance system over the line and makes you feel nauseous. But the motion sensors in your inner ear pick up the movement of the car. When you're reading in the back of a car, your eyes transmit a message to your brain that the world around you is still. And that can overwhelm our movement sensors," he says.Ĭertain behaviors can make the stress on our balance system even worse. When we use today's motorized vehicles to get from A to B, we are exposed to more intense movements than those that are part of our normal human repertoire of movements. "This system was developed, through thousands of years of evolution, for normal human movements and postural control. ![]() "The symptoms come from an overload of our balance system," Schönfeld explained. Back to motion sic― uh, kinetosis, to use the correct medical term. In June, he starts a new research project at Berlin's renowned Charité university clinic. One of Schönfeld's areas of expertise is the nausea some of us experience when we travel. Schönfeld: Our balance systems weren't made for fast car rides Image: Charité Uwe Schönfeld, an electrical engineer and medical physicist, told DW. "It's not a sickness in the sense that there's a bodily malfunction somewhere," Dr. In fact, why do loads of unlucky folk get motion sick more frequently and more easily than others? And where does the dreaded nausea come from?įirst, I'm told, calling it motion sickness is wrong. ![]() So I wonder why I got motion sick… again. Read more: BMW, Daimler team up to develop self-driving cars And I followed all the rules, too: Sit up front in the passenger seat, eyes on the horizon and not stuck in a book. My friends in the backseat were totally fine. It was probably the stop-and-go traffic that made me feel so sick. comes out, the feeling is still miserable. You're actually nagging the driver to find a way out of rush-hour traffic to pull over, and while nothing. You're in a car with a driver who's taking you safely from one end of Delhi to the other, your friends are chatting in the backseat ― and you feel like throwing up.
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