Symptoms: nausea, paleness or “green” tinge to skin, excessive perspiration, vomiting, and anxiety.

Home care

Give the child an anti-nausea remedy recommended by the doctor. Give this medication an hour before a trip and then every four hours during the journey.

Keep the child cool.

Restrict the diet.

Have the child look out the window while traveling. Distract the child with a game during the trip.

Precautions

Some children are more susceptible than others to motion sickness.

Motion sickness is not brought on by the child, and the child can’t control it.

Prolonged motion sickness can lead to severe vomiting and finally to dehydration, which is an emergency situation and requires hospital care.

A child who is susceptible to motion sickness will have repeated attacks every time he or she travels.

Car, air, and sea sickness are all forms of motion sickness. Prolonged rhythmic motion up and down or from side to side will make most children nauseated, presumably because the movement affects the balance mechanism of the inner ears. Some children are more susceptible to motion sickness than others; young infants are apparently immune. Motion sickness is not deliberately brought on by the child, nor can the child control it. Susceptible children will have attacks over and over.

Signs and symptoms

Motion sickness is fairly easy to recognize. A motion-sick child becomes nauseated, pale or “green,” and anxious; the child may perspire and vomit.

Home care

If your child suffers from motion sickness, ask your doctor to recommend an anti-nausea medication. Give your child an anti-nauseate by mouth one hour before the start of each trip, and then every four hours during the trip. Dimenhydrinate anti-nauseate tablets or liquid are highly effective and safe. It also helps to keep the child cool and on a light diet before and during the trip. Having the child look out the car window will often eliminate motion sickness. Distracting the child with a game can also be useful.

Precaution

Prolonged motion sickness (over hours) can eventually result in excessive vomiting and dehydration.

Medical treatment

Your doctor’s treatment will be the same as your home treatment unless the child has become dehydrated. Dehydration requires hospital care during which the child is given fluids intravenously.

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• Too much sugar has not been proved harmful to the blood pressure in humans but it has in animals. One experiment in monkeys found that adding sugar to a high-salt diet made the blood pressure jump even higher. (Refined sugar definitely has an adverse effect on cholesterol metabolism-putting up the levels of harmful blood fats which also predispose to heart disease. Unrefined, complex sugars do the opposite.)

• Stress undoubtedly plays a part in producing at least some cases of high blood pressure, and almost certainly keeps it high in others. Many studies have now proved that biofeedback, autogenic training and self-hypnosis can all be used to reduce blood pressure in hypertensives. Simple meditation can reduce blood pressure both at the time and long-term. In a study reported in 1981 one group of hypertensives was taught how to relax, while a parallel group was left alone. The relaxation group had a three times greater drop in blood pressure than the others. On checking six months later the difference in blood pressures was still the same.

It appears that if you expect relaxation techniques to be successful they are more likely to be so. A study of thirty patients under medical treatment for high blood pressure divided the patients into two groups. The first group was told that the muscle-relaxation exercises they were to do could produce immediate results which would persist with increased practice and the second group were told that the value of the relaxation could be delayed and that they might even expect a small rise in blood pressure. The ‘expectant’ group achieved a 17 point fall in systolic blood pressure but the ‘delayed’ group had only a 2-4 point fall.

We see how dangerous caffeine can be. A study in Nashville found a 14 per cent rise in blood pressure in volunteers who consumed the equivalent of about two cups of coffee. This made the researchers conclude that habitual coffee drinkers keep their blood pressures artificially high and that some will push marginal blood pressures into the seriously hypertensive range that needs treatment.

• Exercise can provably reduce blood pressure. A study in Florida looked at 370 hypertensive patients and measured their blood pressure before and after several twenty-minute rides on a stationary bicycle. About 96 per cent of the volunteers had a fall of blood pressure (of between 10 and 50 points) after three months’ exercise.

• Noise can produce blood pressure and removing it prevents it. Monkey experiments found that after nine months of exposure to a noise level typically experienced by industrial workers the animals’ blood pressures went up by an average of 27 per cent. After the end of the experiment the monkeys’ blood pressure remained high for over a month even in the absence of noise. Investigations at the Volvo car factory in Sweden checked the effect of industrial noise on the blood pressure of their workers. Because some people are thought to be more sensitive to noise the researchers selected out all those with noise-induced hearing loss. All 414 men with hearing loss turned out to have significantly higher blood pressures than the 74 men with normal hearing.

Further evidence of the strain of noise comes from studies done on people who live near airports. A study of those living around Los Angeles International Airport found that people living within 3 miles of the airport had 29 per cent more admissions to mental hospital than those living 6 miles away. A similar study of London’s Heathrow Airport found the figure to be 31 per cent.

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