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Anti-nausea wristbands really work??

MikeSun5

Trigger Happy Pacifist,
MikeSun5
Joined
Apr 18, 2009
Messages
1,871
So I'm booking a boat ride and notice the tour company advises passengers to bring Dramamine or "those wristbands" to combat seasickness. :confused: A quick search led me to BioBands anti-nausea wristbands which are just cloth straps that pin a small plastic pellet to a pressure point on your wrist.

The website reeks of woo, invoking acupuncture jargon and silly claims like this:

BioBands.com said:
Medical scientists don’t know for sure how acupressure wristbands relieve nausea and vomiting (then again, they don’t know for sure how aspirin works either).
Click to expand...

Turns out "medical scientists" actually do know how aspirin works, but I digress...

What prompted me to post this here is the studies that apparently prove BioBands actually work. My first reaction was to dismiss the results as a product of the placebo effect, but there are quite a few studies that test the product in double-blind experiments against placebos. :eye-poppi I did not expect the results of studies like that to support any claims of acupressure, yet that's exactly what they seem to do.

Are these results flawed? Fabricated entirely? Legitimate? Any thoughts, JREFers?
 
There are many forum members better suited to reply to this than myself - I am by no means skilled in interpreting medical journal reports.

However I found it interesting that in all the reports cited by the BioBands site, in every case I looked at, the patients were all receiving some other form of treatment in addition to the acupressure method. So I'm suspicious how they could determine whether or not it was the band doing the work, or the medicine.

Likewise, when I was searching around PubMed to make sure these were real entries, I found a lot of journal entries that had not been chosen by BioBand to post on their site.

Finally, I'm not the expert, but are any of these journals 'BIG' journals?

Hope this helps...
 
Warning! Anecdote to follow:

I suffered from really bad motion sickness as a child. Tried the acupressure wristbands for quite a while, never had any discernible effect (other than irritation from the tight, woolly bands).
 
Mythbusters tested several remedies. The only one that worked consistently was Ginger. I think it was taken in pill form.
 
Pantaz said:
Mythbusters tested several remedies. The only one that worked consistently was Ginger. I think it was taken in pill form.
Click to expand...

They also completely botched placebos and controls. And a sample size of two... :p

I had some of those bands when I was young. I don't recall them being particularly effective. Staring as forward as possible out the window and to the horizon is my best tool. If I try to read or even look too long through my iPod, I get horribly nauseous.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
They also completely botched placebos and controls. And a sample size of two... :p

I had some of those bands when I was young. I don't recall them being particularly effective. Staring as forward as possible out the window and to the horizon is my best tool. If I try to read or even look too long through my iPod, I get horribly nauseous.
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Not being in a car with 4 other kids puking their guts up is also helpful.
 
The links that Professor Yaffle provided also seem to point to stimulation of that acupressure point on the wrist to be more effective than a placebo. :boggled: This is really bugging me out.

I wonder if it's some sort of mental distraction method... when I was a kid and I had to get vaccines or innoculations, I was really scared of needles. I remember the doctor pinching me on the thigh before sticking my arm, and I'd be so surprised at the sensation of the pinch, I wouldn't even feel the needle. Maybe that weird feeling of the wristband is just a distraction from the nausea.

I've never undergone chemotherapy or been pregnant, but I've been on many boats. The nausea eventually passes as you get used to the motion of the water. The BioBands website says it takes 5-15 minutes (or more) before you feel any relief, but also warns that these acupressure points can move around which may result in no relief at all. I wonder what the "placebos" in the study consisted of? If these points can move, a wristband intentionally placed incorrectly could potentially work anyway. This is all very weird to me.
 
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I skimmed Yaffle's three posts. Only the first one to me seemed like it MAY be 'pro' accupressure. The other two are distinctly inconclusive / somewhat negative.
 
MikeSun5 said:
I've never undergone chemotherapy or been pregnant, but I've been on many boats. The nausea eventually passes as you get used to the motion of the water. The BioBands website says it takes 5-15 minutes (or more) before you feel any relief, but also warns that these acupressure points can move around which may result in no relief at all. I wonder what the "placebos" in the study consisted of? If these points can move, a wristband intentionally placed incorrectly could potentially work anyway. This is all very weird to me.
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That's not a universal experience, as far as motion sickness goes, unless you mean it finally passes after days of constant acclimation.

I get no motion sickness whatsoever on ground transportation--cars, trains, buses. I can read, look out, not look out, lie down, sleep, ride forward or backward, etc.

Haven't been on boats enough to know, but adding the third dimension is apparently what does it for me.

On airplanes, I feel no nausea until I've been on the plane about one to two hours, then I start vomiting and the vomiting continues for several hours after landing, and the nausea continues for several hours after that.

Dramamine works fine, but ginger, looking at the horizon, etc., are worthless. There's no way a placebo or distraction would help in the least, and though I haven't tried the wristband, I expect it would do nothing for me.

So I wonder if there are different kinds or levels of motion sickness, some of which are amenable to minor things such as looking at the horizon, ginger, distraction, etc., and some of which aren't. That's why none of the wristband studies said it worked even close to 100%.

It's still odd that it works at all, better than placebo, but apparently there's a minor kind of motion sickness that some people (like me) never get, but which other people do, and a major kind that some people (like me) only get, but others don't.
 
I also tried ginger capsules as a child. No effect, other than an unpleasantly strong aftertaste - the stuff in the capsules is extremely concentrated.

The pressure of the wrist bands didn't help to distract me at all: in fact, on a hot summers day, in a car driving along winding mountain roads, I think it made me feel worse.
 
Pup said:
Dramamine works fine, but ginger, looking at the horizon, etc., are worthless. There's no way a placebo or distraction would help in the least, and though I haven't tried the wristband, I expect it would do nothing for me.

So I wonder if there are different kinds or levels of motion sickness, some of which are amenable to minor things such as looking at the horizon, ginger, distraction, etc., and some of which aren't. That's why none of the wristband studies said it worked even close to 100%.

It's still odd that it works at all, better than placebo, but apparently there's a minor kind of motion sickness that some people (like me) never get, but which other people do, and a major kind that some people (like me) only get, but others don't.
Click to expand...

I agree, there are many different varieties of motion sickness. I took a three day ferry trip once, doped myself up on dramamine but still woke up nauseous the first night. To my surprise, staring at the (dark) horizon did actually make me feel better after a while, and the next few days were fine.

On the other hand, my worst experience was in a small motorboat. After 5 minutes at sea, I couldn't stand up. On top of the nausea, the entire right side of my body (including my head) had gone numb. If the friend who had taken me fishing hadn't rushed me back to the beach straight away, I don't know what would have happened.
 
As a child I suffered from extremely severe travel sickness in any vehicles apart from trains. Has anyone else experienced this or know why that might be ? I always assumed it was due to trains moving in a guided manner on the railroad tracks. These wristbands did nothing for me, nor did ginger or sitting on a newspaper. I swear dramamine actually made me worse. Joyrides pills didn't help either although curiously Kwells (both contain Hyoscine hydrobromide) did, I realised the reason for this years later - whilst Joyrides are a paediatric medicine, the Kwells were not recommended for children under 12 and my mum had unwittingly been giving me them in the maximum dose recommended (even for an adult), she was never one for reading labels. I've a hunch that the armbands may have a placebo effect in some people - same with newspapers.
 
As someone who sufferes from car sickness, I used the bands as a child. I think they worked because I was told they worked, they don't seem to work now. Travel sickness tablets from the chemist do the job, but do make me hungry for most of the day.

Best cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree.
 
Has there been any serious research in pressure points? Everyone knows what a light but precise strike to the solar plexus or funny bone does.
 
Pup said:
That's not a universal experience, as far as motion sickness goes, unless you mean it finally passes after days of constant acclimation.
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For me, on a boat in choppy waters, it takes about three hours.
 
I get seasick quite easily. Tried these wristbands, and they did not do a thing for me.

I stick with Dramamine, and with getting into water as fast as possible when the boat reaches the dive site.
 
Modified said:
For me, on a boat in choppy waters, it takes about three hours.
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There are definitely totally different reactions going on, then. A flight of a couple hours won't bother me at all. My sickness doesn't start until about two hours, but continues at least five hours on the trip itself (haven't traveled longer than that by airplane), and lasts hours after the trip is over.

I'm wondering if motion sickness treatment studies take into account differences like that.

A treatment which actually had zero effect, would "cure" you by the end of a three-hour trip but would make me worse, but if tested on an hour-and-a-half trip, it would "prevent" sickness for me but not for you.
 
Pup said:
There are definitely totally different reactions going on, then. A flight of a couple hours won't bother me at all. My sickness doesn't start until about two hours, but continues at least five hours on the trip itself (haven't traveled longer than that by airplane), and lasts hours after the trip is over.
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That sounds like my wife. I wonder if there may be different mechanisms of motion sickness. I would never have any problem on a plane or in a car, but six foot swells in a 22 foot boat will do it after twenty minutes or so. When I start feeling better, the motion actually becomes comforting.
 
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