do sea sickness bands really work?

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For those of you out there like me who are sensitive to the side effects of traditional motion sickness medications, I might suggest trying Zofran (odansetron). It is used heavily (IV) in the treatment of chemotherapy-induced nausea but I use it occasionally for my hospitalized patients with nausea (I'm a general internist, not an oncologist).

I wouldn't recommend it as a first line agent because its very expensive (and you need a prescription for it), but I've had decent success with it.
Definitely worth a try if everything else has failed you. I think its well worth the money if it means the difference between diving and not diving.
If the seabands work for you, though, more power to you.

Hope this is helpful :)

-Shaun
 
There may be a study somewhere, but I can't imagine any way of doing a blinded study of these bands. The theory behind them is thoroughly bogus. I have no doubt that some users have experienced relief with them on, but that is nowhere near proof that they have any beneficial effect.

Ondansetron, now THAT's good stuff! If the price came down, I'd probably take it any time I go out on a boat.
 
cra2:
Your statement could only be valid IF the user was hoping/thinking this solution was THE solution that was going to save them.

This is NOT AT ALL how placebo effects work. They have nothing to do with intensity of hope, with gullibility, or with ignorance. I actually once had a patient who *requested* a placebo after having read about them. We had to go through the IRB to get permission, and I sat down with him to pick out a color of placebo (the brand he selected has different numbers and colors, but of course not really different "sizes"). He knew from the outset that he would not be getting any active medication. He had a moderately good response that lasted for many months.

Keep in mind that placebo effects are well-established with non-medication treatments, too. They're seen with surgery and all sorts of other interventions. They are also seen on the part of observers and researchers, not just recipients of treatments (hence the huge importance of double-blinding in research). Hypnosis is probably the ultimate placebo effect. (I've got nothing whatsoever against hypnosis: I used to do hypnosis for pain control in a burn ICU and my son was born under hypnoanalgesia after my wife had a poor response to epidural analgesia with our first kid). Testimonial evidence is *worthless* in medicine because of the strength of placebo effects. Lots and lots of things work great for given individuals without any predictable benefits for most users.

Placebo effects are not imaginary or "all in the head." They are very, very real indeed. It's just that they are not mediated by pharmacological effects or by physiological processes that we've been able to identify. Seasickness bands, with or without electricity, work via placebo effects.
 
Unfortunally the best thing for it is smoking you know what. Some cancer patients smoke it for that reason,but it maybe a little hard on a dive trip. But it is like turning a light switch off. Works that quick,,,,so they say.
By no means am I approving of this pratice on land or sea. Best to stay legal anyway. I use a scop patch. Get them by the handful.
 
More people need to watch Mythbusters.
 
kensuguro:
hmm... well, interesting reports. I knew there was something about the bands that didn't sit well with me.. So I guess it leaves me with ginger candies or other things that have to be ingested, or oils?

I always keep a bottle of Ginger capsules in my dive bag. Also have a bottle on our boat. They work good for me if I'm feeling sick. You can buy them in the vitamin/health section.

I also have a tendency of getting sea sick. I've learned to control it better in the last few years but, I know that miserable feeling well.

I take a Bonine before bed. Then I'll take a 1/2 a Bonine an hour before I get on the boat (1/2 because it makes me sleepy for the drive to the boat). I also use the bands.
The bands don't work for everyone but, I've taken them off before and right away I would start feeling sick again.

But, here's another thing. One day on our boat going out to the Channel Islands. I have my bands on but, at one point I thought I took them off before I jumped in the water. I got back on the boat and started feeling woosey so I was in a panick looking for my bands before I got worst. I actually never took them off. :shakehead I found them on my wrists under my dry suit when I took my suit off. :D
 
The bands I'm talking about are the Sea Bands for pressure points. Not the one's the "buzz" you.
 
i have found that if I am diving off a boat I make sure I get on with a full stomach, it makes a big difference, rather then going on a stomach half full. Now I always make sure I eat fully before I get on a boat to dive
 
mstevens:
Placebo effects are not imaginary or "all in the head." They are very, very real indeed. It's just that they are not mediated by pharmacological effects or by physiological processes that we've been able to identify. Seasickness bands, with or without electricity, work via placebo effects.
I'm sure you're better acquainted with the literature on this than I am; just thought this might be interesting:

But after nearly 50 years of acceptance, the placebo effect is now being questioned. In a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Dr. Peter C. Gotzsche of the University of Copenhagen and Nordic Cochran Center reported the results of their recent study. They reviewed journal articles looking for the original research stating that 35-percent of patients improve if given a placebo. All the papers they looked at did not include original research on the placebo effect but cited a reference. When they looked up the paper being referenced, it cited another reference. It turns out that the original source of the statement was a 1955 article “The Powerful Placebo” published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The paper was written by Henry Beecher, who had been chief of anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Dr. Beecher had analyzed about a dozen studies and came up with the 35-percent figure.

The Danish doctors had concerns about the validity of Dr. Beecher's figure and decided to delve into it further. They were concerned that two important facts were being ignored: that the natural course of many diseases is to wax and wane and the statistically-shown observation that a patient who feels terrible one day will almost certainly feel better the next.

To get at this issue they analyzed 114 studies published between 1946 and 1998 that had not two but three groups of patients. In addition to the two groups receiving a medication or a placebo, there was a third group that received nothing — no medication and no placebo. To the doctors' surprise, patients in the third group improved as often as those in the placebo group. In addition, they could find no objective measure of improvement in the placebo group, such as lowered blood pressure. The studies they used involved about 7,500 patients with 40 different medical conditions, including medical disorders such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels and asthma; behavioral disorders and addictions, like alcohol abuse and smoking; neurological diseases like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and epilepsy, and infections, like bacterial infections and the common cold
.
 
vladimir:
But after nearly 50 years of acceptance, the placebo effect is now being questioned.

Yep, that one's a doozy. Maybe it means that the placebo effect is primarily one that affects the observer rather than the subject. Of course, in many instances that will be the same person.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/swift/

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