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Mixed messages lead to motion sickness
Motion sickness has ruined March Madness for Dave Evans, 59, of Sun City West, Ariz. Too many basketball players running madly up and down the court.
It has sent him reeling from movie theaters, made him outlaw ceiling fans and kept him out of carwashes and off amusement park rides.
His physical reactions to movement are extreme, but his ailment is a common one, affecting as many as nine out of 10 people at some point, studies have found.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 60 percent of kids traveling in cars or airplanes and almost all travelers in rough seas, regardless of age, experience motion-related discomfort or nausea.
"Discomfort" is an understatement for what people like Evans suffer when the nausea center of their brain receives conflicting messages from the inner ears, eyes and sensory receptors about their body's movement through space.
Licensed acupuncturist Laurie Perez, a professor at the Phoenix Institute of Herbal Medicine and Acupuncture, wards off motion sickness with Chinese medicine practices, including pressing her fingers on the anti-nausea Neiguan point on her inner wrist. Sea-Band and similar wristbands work on the same principle.
Researchers, including gastroenterologist Kenneth Koch of Wake Forest University School of Medicine believe genes do play a role in motion sickness.
While at Pennsylvania State University, he and psychologist Robert Stern for years placed a changing lineup of volunteers in a rotating drum to study their reactions to motion.
Asian-Americans were "hyper-susceptible" compared with Americans of European or African heritage, they discovered.
Paul McGrath of DeBary, Fla., developed the ginger based Queeze-Eze with chiropractor-nutritionist John Rupolo after serving as a diving medical officer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Evans now takes a daily dose of prescription-strength meclizine hydrochloride, the anti- histamine in over-the-counter motion-sickness medication.