Tom Tripp’s OceanLines has this story:

Motion sickness, to quote Dr. Patricia S. Cowings, of NASA’s Ames Research Center, “won’t kill you — you just wish it would.” She and a colleague have discovered that a regimen of biofeedback training is more effective than even the powerful anti-nausea drugs given to NASA astronauts — some 50 percent of whom suffer from airsickness during spaceflight. An MSNBC blog piece by Chris Tachibana cites the publication of this new research by Cowings and Dr. William B. Toscano in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

 

Motion sickness has been a serious concern for NASA for a long time. The debilitating affliction can compromise the potential accomplishments of a spaceflight that is on a strict timeline with no allowance for downtime or sudden crew shortages. But I guess it should all make us feel better that half of all the people with The Right Stuff still get “seasick.”

The biofeedback technique discovered by Cowings and Toscano involves learning to control heart rate and sweating, principally using breathing techniques combined with high-tech biofeedback. It’s more than just relaxation, the techniques actually lower heart rates and diminish sweating, which have the effect of stopping nausea.

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