I'm curious if anybody has had a similar experience to me, with a regular passenger having a history of motion sickness. My girlfriend is a very small woman with a quietly determined and disciplined personality. Unrelated to that, she suffers from motion sickness... I have the dubious distinction of unintentionally having made her ill in a car, on a motorcycle, and in an aircraft. She's had it her whole life, but does not suffer from it while driving herself. She actually used to feel ill on commercial airliners in smooth weather (!) but now with more experience and a motion sickness pill it doesn't occur any more. She is a very enthusiastic motorcycle passenger, and loves to go quickly... despite the fact that I once made her violently ill on a twisty alpine road.
With respect to flying in light aircraft, for reasons she does not fully explain (and regardless of my absolute assurance that its fine with me either way) she wants to be able to fly with me and we've kind of taken it on as a project. We've been flying progressively longer flights on the absolute smoothest of days. Today was one of those days, I was careful and we had no problems.
My question is if anybody else here has been through this successfully, and raised the passenger's threshold to the point where it's not much of an issue. Any other constructive tips would also be appreciated.
Sounds like you're taking this on just fine.
As far as I know, there are two things that happen against motion sickness:
Ability to predict what the aircraft/vehicle is doing. What helps the most here is being in control yourself. But also being able to look around for the horizon and such.
Repeated exposure
And then there's various medicines that are supposed to help. Ginger, Primatour, a cotton ball in your left ear if you're right handed (and vice versa), ... But some of these methods have the side effect of making you drowsy.
What about letting her fly a bit?
One can teach someone to fly, at a basic level, in not many minutes.
I did about 100k miles on motorbikes (1970s) and enjoyed it 100% but hated sitting on the back of one.
Thanks very much for that info... she thanks you for your responses. I explained to her before posting initially that this was a site where the responses were likely to be constructive :-)
She can't eat Ginger, which is frustrating, because of an adverse physical reaction. However, several of the behavioral ideas in the NHS writeup are what she does now (focusing on a distant point, limiting head movements etc) which provides some confidence. Some of the other suggestions are new to her and can be tried!
I do offer the aircraft controls to her from time to time, but she has only taken me up on it once... She did fine despite the fear of nausea and now I've made an extra seat cushion to get her up another 6 inches to improve the view.
Peter - re motorcycling as a passenger (or perhaps being a passenger with any vehicle), I agree that it's really a completely different experience... and it's easy for the 'pilot' to forget it. The same thing goes for the view - a small person may not be able to see where they're going. That said, this woman is truly amazing when riding with me on a motorcycle. She feels motion sickness far less than in a car (motorcycles bank to turn like all good vehicles :-), she weighs something a bit over half my weight, she's pretty much fearless, and she never moves around in any way that would be noticeable.
In time, maybe we can get her up to speed in the plane.
PS BackPacker - the cotton ball idea is intriguing!
In my experience its best to be looking forward or at the horizon when looking out the side window. When I'm not flying or driving (I.e. just being a passenger) I get mild motion sickness if I have got my head down looking at at a newspaper/iPad/Camera, or staring down at the ground when in the plane. I'm guessing its a bit more serious for your girlfriend, but that's the only advice I can offer personally I'm afraid.
My Dad was a sailor for a while and his view was that if you eyes and your inner ear are giving conflicting signals about the outside world, you'd probably suffer from motion sickness.
Which stacks up with the 'look outside' advices already given . . .
Presumably you're aware of the basic mechanical actions - keep looking outside, fresh air, have something to do, reasonable light levels ?
The point acted on by "seasickness bands" is remarkably effective, but you don't need to spend £10 in Boots to use it. Look at the inside of the wrist, there are two creases. About the length of the front thumbjoint down from the lower (furthest from the palm crease is a point that if you prod it is ever so slightly tender. That's the point acted on by anti-seasickness bands. It can be gently massaged by the thumb of the other hand and be quite good at damping down nausea. (In Chinese medicine the point is called Pericardium 6 if you want to look it up.)
G
(Hobby interest in Shiatsu and some related arts.)
Very interesting G. Thanks, and I will look that up...
The evidence for ginger is quite poor so you're probably not missing out on much. In practical terms, if you can take somebody to the point of nausea then back it can be beneficial in terms of ''expanding the envelope", but if you ever actually make them vomit it can be self-reinforcing.
