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It's definitely an 'uncomfortable' topic but we're going to talk about SCUBA diving and managing motion sickness.
I started diving here in Colorado in 2002. I never had any trouble with motion sickness and SCUBA diving until I went on my first dive trip to Cairns, Australia later that year on a liveaboard.
I was so sick that I had to cut my time on the boat short by a day or two. Is there anything I could have done to get the most out of my time and enjoyed it more?
Let's dive into SCUBA diving and managing motion sickness!
Full Show Notes | https://updiveblog.link/updc010
Contact the Show
skubasteve@updiveblog.com
https://underpressurediveblog.com
TW & IG | @skubasteveupdb
The Under Pressure Divecast is the SCUBA diving podcast dedicated to making SCUBA fun, entertaining and accessible! Join me SKuba Steve as I go over topics related to recreational SCUBA diving, discuss gear and provide easy tips that make your diving more enjoyable, comfortable, safer or more memorable.
SKuba Steve
Well, it's definitely an uncomfortable topic. But today we're going to talk about scuba diving and motion sickness. I started diving here in Colorado in 2002. And I never had any trouble with motion sickness, as you might imagine. Until I went to my on my first dive trip to Cannes, Australia, and I was on a live aboard. And then I learned about motion sickness in scuba diving. I was so sick that I actually had to cut my trip short by a couple of days. And, you know, you have to wonder, Is there something that you could have done to extend the time on the boat or make the time that you were on the boat a little more enjoyable? So let's dive into scuba, and managing motion sickness. Today we're going to talk about as they said, we're going to we're going to go through what is you know what, live TV I skipped my normal intro, getting your gear on because it's time to descend into another episode of the underpressure dive cast. I'm your host, scuba Steve. Scuba diving is a fun and exciting adventure sport. And you can be a scuba diver. And to help you get there, the underpressure dive cast is here and dedicated to promoting and discussing recreational scuba diving. Alright, so now what are we going to cover today? Well, we're going to talk about a little bit of news. This is a little more lighthearted. We don't have any show news this week, because things are pretty ironed out. I think at this point moving forward. We're going to talk about what some of the causes of well were, first we're going to talk about what is what are what causes motion sickness. And then we're going to talk about some of the remedies that are out there. And, and kind of try to as I said, last week, we're going to try to get into some of the facts around things and and the science behind it, rather than just sticking to what you might hear on forums and stuff like that. So then we'll talk in the gear junkies rush, we'll talk a little bit about something and we'll have a tip of the week. So let's move on to the news.
Alright, so as I mentioned, we have we don't have any show news this week. Like I said, I think things are moving pretty well. Getting things organized, there may be a few things that we're going to change, but things are going alright. The the industry news that I want to talk about this week is if you're a diver and you've been diving for any length of time, and it's like anything that you get that you have a passionate about that you get knowledgeable about. If you see it in popular culture pretty soon you start to get or it can get aggravating when people don't get it right. And movies have and television shows are notorious for getting Scooba wrong. And so this week, you know, there's this week, I wanted to talk about a fun show that I found out about on Netflix, called the dive club. Now this is not intense or action oriented from the perspective of adult entertainment. This is a rated G or whatever rated E for everyone I think, show. And you know, to be honest, it's campy, it's fancy family friendly, but it's fun to watch. And they actually shows scuba diving, using thoughtful techniques and, and reasonable and responsible practice. And so it's really nice to see that and I wanted to point it out, in case you're interested. It isn't perfect, because you have to have team drama in a team drama, but as a rule, they really portray their scuba diving as safe and and thought out so kudos to them for that I liked it. On the other side of the spectrum, you can watch 47 meters down which is just
horrible. Alright.
Let's move on to the main topic.
All right, for those of you keeping score, No, I haven't fixed the main topic. Transition slide yet. Still have to put a little header on that will do that. So motion sickness now. Motion sickness affects some people more than others. Some people maybe have no trouble with it all. Some people can't even look at water. And of course you can get motion sick not just in a bow You can get airsick carsick, it's all really the same thing. And so what causes motion sickness in the first place, because it'd be nice to know that if we if we knew what caused it, maybe we could find a solution ourselves, you know? Well, what happens with motion sickness is that your eyes perceive one thing. Your muscles are responding to different stimuli. And then your inner ear, which is where our balances, our balance comes from, isn't sensing the same thing that our muscles are sensing is, and it's not sensing the same thing that our eyes are sensing. And so we have this cognitive disconnect between these three sensory inputs. And that confuses our brain, and results in nausea. And, in extreme cases, vomiting, it also makes you really, really tired. Being at least that's my experience, that's not science. There may be science behind it, but my experience is that being motion sick is absolutely exhausting. So definitely not something that you want. As part of your dive experience, because now you're a you're tired, but you're also very uncomfortable. Sometimes you can even get, you'll find that being in the water, you know, down on the reef, you're under the waves, everything's fine, you get on the surface, and you cannot wait to get back to shore. Because you're starting to get you can get sick simply by bobbing around on the top of the water, waiting to get on the boat or waiting your turn to get on the pier or whatever, whatever it may be. So the other thing that I noticed, and this isn't so much about motion sickness, per se, as it is with vertigo. And that is if one ear gets filled with water, usually it's cold water that affects me the most personally, if one ear gets filled with water faster than the other or first, I end up getting vertigo. And so what do I have to do in cold water, it's pretty easy to solve that problem. It's uncomfortable, but you just have to flood both ears at the same time. And usually, for me, what happens is, is this is when I'm wearing a hood. So if I'm in my dry suit, I'm usually wearing my hood. And I'm going into cold water because that's when I wear my dry suit to begin with. And that's what happens is one ear will get with the hood Will you know it is doesn't it's not my hood is not a dry hood, but it's tight. So it may block one ear more than the other. And what I have to do is literally just pull it out, flood my ears, it's cold, it is uncomfortable for a few seconds while the water gets down into my brain. Let the hoods seal backup, and then I'm good to go. Right? The water was in your ears warms up, but it's even. So you don't necessarily have that lopsided temperature effect that, for me causes vertigo. So that's a quick fix if you're a vertigo if you experience vertigo. in cold water that may be what's causing it. And that's a way that I have found that it really helps to fix it. But how does motion sickness at itself affect scuba divers? Well, it's disorienting. And I have a really good story about this particular aspect of of in this case, it was again it actually was vertigo. And let me go through the story. But I we were doing
a cleanup under the pier at one of the local lakes. And I started to feel really disoriented to the point where I literally didn't know which way was up, which is not a great thing to know to be confused about when you're a diver. And it's hard to imagine not being in that spirit in that experience. Right now it's hard for me to even imagine it. But but it was real. I honestly had no idea which way was up I had to we were in relatively shallow water, I think 35 feet or so. And so I actually had to go down to the bottom so I can figure out where the bottom was and then I can figure out where up was. So that wasn't too hard because you let some air out of your bc just let yourself go down. But what ended up happening is I finally figured out and I I looked up, followed my bubbles went to the surface. told my buddy I didn't feel well and went back to the shore. And when I got home It turned out that I had 104 degree fever so I had the flu I hadn't had any symptoms until I got into the water. And so that was just really bad timing. But it did demonstrate for me what happens if you're disoriented in low visibility, you can actually lose track of where up is, which can be an unsafe condition. So aside from disorientation itself, you've got discomfort, obviously nausea, potentially, not vomiting. And, and, and if you're, if you're wondering, it happens often enough that divers call it feeding the fish. And we'll talk a little bit about that in a few minutes. But so if it happens, don't feel bad, because it happens enough that there's a name for it. It can also result as like I alluded to in the intro, a shortened trip or a less enjoyable trip. And we we love scuba diving, we spend money to go places. It's nice if it turns out well, right. And so I guess one thing, you know, let's just get vomiting out of the way. Can you vomit through a regulator? Yes. And what was it gross? Sure. But when the most important thing to remember about this is if you're going to vomit under water, keep your regulator in, because it acts as a plug and just vomit through it. And that's gross, I get it. I won't talk about it anymore. But it's important to remember that.
So
that's the impact of motion sickness on our dives. Right, we get we get our stomach gets upset on the boat. And how do we? How does it impact our experience? What can we do about motion sickness, as scuba divers, and there are quite a few solutions that range from absolutely free and can be done in the moment to not free to even prescription based solutions. So I'm going to go through all of these and talk a little bit about each one. And then at the end, I'll talk about why I choose to do what I do, and the consequences of that. So the first thing we can do is stop, breathe. Think Act is a common thing that we say in diving. So if something's not right, aka I don't feel well. We can use the first two of those. We stop, relax, breathe. You could even go into say meditate and try to relax your body try to focus on something that you're that that you at least hopefully your your brain can get a handle on because they Some people say to focus on the horizon, which may be the best thing to do if you have no other solution, but that doesn't fix what your what your inner ear feels and what your muscles feel as you're standing on the boat, looking at the horizon, right because your eyes see the horizon, they're happy because they know they can orient themselves, but your inner ear still going like this. Right? And your muscles are still trying to compensate for the boat shaking and you're not falling down. So the good thing about just relaxing meditation, whatever, there's no medication, you don't need any equipment. There are no negative effects. And and you can do it any time. You can even do that if you're in the water bobbing waiting for your turn to get on the boat when you have no access to anything that you didn't take with you. Right. So that's the first thing we can do. What's next? ginger, Ginger is well known as something that can settle your stomach. There's there are like all things with scuba diving science. There isn't a lot of it out there. So I didn't find any studies specific to ginger and scuba diving and nausea. But nausea is or ginger is generally accepted as something that can help settle your stomach. And there are studies about that. There aside from being a possible allergen as like any food might be there are no negative effects. The only thing you have to make sure is that you have it available. So you know this is something that you know these days can you travel with a stick of ginger root, probably not in your carry on but you might be able to put it in your checked bag or get it at your destination if you just wanted to on ginger. Another possibility Is there our products? Yeah, you could just eat ginger rich foods when you get where you're going. But that limits the amount of or that that won't even say limits. And what it does is it puts you at the mercy of what's at the destination instead of thinking about it ahead and saying, Okay, what can I do? Well, there are ginger gums that you can also buy, that you can throw in your ear. Again, probably not in your carry on, but you could throw it in your in your check bag. So they again there, aside from being a potential allergen, if you know you're not allergic to ginger, there are no negative effects. So it's something that you can take with you. And oh, the other one is there are ginger supplements. The only thing I'll say about supplements, I'm not a supplement expert, consult your doctor before taking any new supplement thing. But the other thing is, also make sure you're getting it from a reputable vendor there. There have been a lot of cases are there a few years ago, there's a lot of concern around the sourcing of supplements because they weren't were well regulated, that has begun to change. And we are seeing regulation and and better accountability for these companies. But it is important to make sure you go to a reputable company to get supplements if that's what you're going to choose to do. Alright, so
that's ginger, the next one that comes up is B six, which is just a vitamin, and you can buy it in pill form. There are probably foods that are rich and be six, I can't I don't know any off the top of my head. But again, you go back to this is something that's easy to get. Get it from a reputable dealer, consult your physician before starting any change in your supplementary diet. And then again, you have a there's really no negative effects that are are published anyway, on taking a basic supplement. And certainly over you know, if you say okay, I'm going to take it around a dive trip, you're not introducing that into your entire lifestyle, perhaps. But it can have positive effects throughout your your dive trip. And there are studies that demonstrate that both ginger and B six vitamins help with nausea. They don't, neither of these things treat motion sickness, and neither does meditating. Right. And so I want to be very clear about that. These are things that are simply designed or intended to alleviate one of the symptoms of motion sickness which and in arguably the worst symptom, which is nausea. So that's something to think about. But they are Enix relatively inexpensive, readily available. And, and don't have any negative effects if you don't have an allergy. So something to think about. So we we move on to the next layer, if you will, of treatments, there are a couple of product level items that I want to talk about. One of them is the C band, which is basically an elastic band with a knob under it that puts pressure on a pressure point in your wrist that is supposed to alleviate motion sickness or nausea. And again, like anything I've talked about the studies regarding specifically scuba diving and any of these products, there aren't any that I could find at least. And I would love to post any any updated information if somebody does know of one. But basically these things are used to relieve nausea based on being on a boat or a plane or whatever. These are 13 bucks for a pair of them. And they're again, there's no negative effects. They in the case of the C band, they have study information on their website. Okay, so you can actually go to C dash band COMM And I will put the links in the show notes. And you'll find information that they cite as validating their product claims. Of course, a company is going to publish what generally supports what they want to project. But they they did put it out there and there are some studies that they cite in their literature. They actually have a very long paper about it. And one of the studies they cite says there was no change between this product and this and the placebo. So it you could make the argument they at least were willing To have some data that didn't 100% back them and say this is the greatest thing ever. So, you know, do they work? I got a pair of see bands A long time ago, actually for the trip to Australia in 2002, when I did get sick, they did not do anything for me. Okay, was I using them wrong? I don't know. I just what I would tell you is it didn't help me. So that's my own experience. The, your mileage may vary, a lot of people seems to the next product level that I want to talk about is the relief band. And this is a little bit different than then the C bands in that it's a watch like device, it probably actually looks, the newest one looks very much like my Fitbit. And it actually provides an electric shock to a similar point on your wrist, as the C band puts pressure. And this is supposed to basically do the same thing is it's going to relieve nausea. Well, you're in it for a little more on this one, the minimum cost is about $80. It goes up to $250. In the United States, for the fancy one that's electronic. They, I
they say that it's clinically proven, but they didn't share any data that I could find on their website to validate that claim. And I did reach out to both c band and relief band and ask them, could you provide me information about your product, or this podcast, and neither company provided me any additional information. So I was, you know, kind of on my own to do some research? Well, the the relief band, oh, and they also say they're FDA cleared? Well, I think it's important to know that that they use FDA cleared and clinically proven as little taglines on their homepage, but they don't have anywhere on the site that backs that up. And if you're not familiar with the FDA is terminology, the FDA clearing something doesn't say that it's an endorsement or that the FDA says it will work for this. Okay, I want to make it clear that that's not the same thing. And so the, the, when I did do some research and tried to find studies, in the case of both the C band and the relief band, it was very difficult to find something that just said these things work significantly better than a placebo. There were some studies that, that and again, these are all done, they're done on the shore, you know, for morning sickness, or air travel or car sickness or something like that, where, you know, honestly, if you have a car that rocks like a boat, you might need to go get some shocks or something, right, you need to get your car fixed. So there's a pretty big difference between road travel and boat travel. And generally speaking, even between air travel, and boat travel, air travel, yeah, you get bombs. And sometimes they're really bad. But typically, at least in my experience, a boat will sway and rock much more continuously. And you're typically if you're on a liveaboard, you're on it, you know, all day instead of you're flying from Denver to Los Angeles, and it takes two and a half hours.
So
there's a different experience and a different level of you know, potential impact of that rocking on your body. And the other thing to remember is the bouncing of a plane feels different to your body than the rock of a boat. And some people may tolerate one or the other differently. And there's not a lot of science about that either that I that I found. The bottom line is, and I will put let's see, I've got 1234556 studies that I found about this, this stuff, which I will put in the show notes for you to read at your leisure. But the bottom line is that these things can have an impact. But the data is not super strong that they do. And one thing I want to point out is that you know if you go to either website, you're gonna see testimonials and you're gonna See, on the relief band website, there's a testimonial from some famous boat captain. I don't know famous boat captain, so didn't mean much to me. But who does a video testimonial for this thing, what I want to remind you is that a video testimonial or written testimonial, while it's nice to have that social proof, it isn't science. And so it doesn't say that it's likely to work for you. It worked for this one person, right? And maybe it will, I don't want to, I don't want to downplay anything that makes your diving experience better. For 12 bucks or 13 bucks for C bands or whatever, you know, even if it's $250 for a relief band, that you can take on trip after trip after trip, if that helps your diving. And even honestly, if I got a relief band, and it made me feel better, and I didn't get seasick, I wouldn't care if it was the placebo effect. Right? I wouldn't care if it was if I if I could put a bracelet from an artist in New Mexico on and have the same effect. I wouldn't care. Because all I want is to have a good experience. So I don't want to detract from the value of something that works. Okay. But what I do want to do is make sure that people understand the expectations that they need to go into this stuff with. It's an experiment until you find something that works. And like relief, Ben has a 30 day return policy. I don't know, you know what that looks like. But if you go on a trip, and and it doesn't work for you, you know, maybe you can send it back and get your money back. But if it does work for you, and you have a great time on a trip, to me, that's money well spent. So I wish I could say that I found glowing evidence one way or the other for these things I didn't. And I'll talk a little bit more about my conclusions in a few minutes. The next thing we have is pharmaceuticals. And I want to say before I even talk about pharmaceuticals and and, and motion sickness. When you start taking medications, and you're mixing that with diving, you need to be careful. Okay? And and I'm gonna I'll just say this upfront. If you if you think Dramamine or melda Mar are the answer to your nausea issues when you're traveling. My suggestion would be take some and get in the deepest water, you can find that you would be diving in as close to your home as possible, get a dive buddy and tell them hey, I want to go to blue home to Mexico and go to 80 feet. And I'm going to take a full dose of Dramamine three hours before we go. And I just want to sit down on the bottom and make sure I don't freak out or you know, swim. So you're exercising, so you're actually working your body a little bit. Make sure your buddy knows what you're doing. To Hey, can you watch out for me while we're doing this crazy experiment. The reason I say that is is doing it in a controlled environment when you're not on vacation with a buddy who is aware of what's going on allows you to do it in the safest way possible. If you're out on the dive with currents with a dive buddy you don't know on a boat. And now you have the anxiety of a dive trip around it and the excitement of a dive trip around it. There's a lot of factors that start to fold into your safety. And that's what I think is the most important thing is we want to dive safe. So that's my spiel on medicating before diving. So Dramamine well, Dramamine does have science behind it. There is documented evidence that it reduces nausea for a lot of people.
The problems with it, drowsiness, blurred vision, constipation, dry mouth, you know, and and, you know, constipation is, you know, that's not a one dive issue. blurred vision, that's a problem but it's also not a common side effect there. It's a it's one of the less common side effects and dry mouth. You're going to get dry mouth if you dive anyway, because the air in your tank is dry. So if you're a diver or if you're an experienced diver, you probably don't even care because we get dry mouth that happens. drowsiness obviously not something you want to have underwater. Is it potentially not a big deal? Because it's when you're down on the reef swimming around? Are you likely to nap? You know, for my money? Not really. Is it possible that it might make your experience less cool. Maybe But, you know, if it keeps you from puking, that has a lot of value, right? So and and I have I have used Dramamine. I think when I was in Puerto Vallarta, I use Dramamine when we went out on the boats and I did not get sick. And I had an absolutely great time I had a really great dive the first two days I did with my wife. And then the second two days, I did a more advanced dive a couple of days later, the dive was good. My buddy was the story that I'm gonna do an episode on dive buddy behavior. We'll do that later. Alright, so. So that's my own experience with Dramamine Is it for me? It does, it did help in that instance. Now, I did take Dramamine on a trip in 2008 1718 in Florida, and it did nothing. And I was miserable. absolutely miserable. And yeah, so I don't know what the difference there was. But I was it was a bummer because I was expecting to be rock solid. The last one I want to talk about is Waldemar which is scopolamine. And this is available by prescription only. And the this and again, you have studies that say that it reduces that suggests that it It reduces nausea in a statistically significant way. Alright, so the studies are not ambiguous or kind of take it or leave it the studies are compelling enough to say okay, probably will help. The consequences or the side effects to Mel damar are our agitation, memory loss, pupil dilation, blurred vision, confusion, drowsiness, dizziness, constipation, again, you know, you're starting to get into and these were the ones that were listed as normal. Okay. The, again, you go back to drowsiness, are you going to get underwater and be okay? Likely is not, the pupil dilation means you're going to be more sensitive to light and some divers are out there going, Hey, this is a low visibility or a low light night dive kind of deal. Well, it's probably not worth it. But when you get to the surface, if it's sunny out, it can be very uncomfortable. The real issues are agitation and confusion. Because those are emotional states that are going to make you less likely to have a good dive, less likely to be a safe diver, which is again, why go back to if you're going to medicate before you dive. Be aware, be aware of how that particular drug impacts your body when you're at depth. Because you can't just take it and sit in your yard and say that's the same as if I were 100 feet underwater, or 60 feet underwater. It's not the same experience. You don't have the same constraints and the same margin of error, right? There's a lot of margin of error if you're sitting in a lounge chair in your back patio.
So
that's, again, that's prescription only. Just as a caveat, if you're going to dive on a prescription medication, make sure you talk to your doctor about it. If you're going to dive on an over the counter medication, I would still recommend you probably talk to your doctor about it. Just to make sure that that you're not going to cross some line that you haven't thought of. Okay, now, I will do a plug real quick for talking to Dan, the divers alert network if you have a question about the interaction of a drug with scuba diving. Now every person is different. So they can't just answer your your question for Oh for Steve, if you take you know, Dramamine, this is what's going to happen to your physiology. But they are a resource out there that is very diverse centric, and if there's any information about that particular drug while you're diving, they'll probably know about it and they can answer your questions at least on a basic level. So that's my spiel on on Ask Dan. You know, go to dan.org and, and email them and they do reply. So just give him a couple of weeks before your dive trip. So you have a little bit of time but kind of wrapping this up. You've got relaxation, be six ginger, easy, inexpensive, they might help. They might not but they're easy and inexpensive. Right. And all of them have some data to back them as solutions. See bands again, super economical. 13 bucks. If they don't work, they you didn't hurt anything. Right. So for me, that's pretty easy to justify. They did. Like I said, they shared their study data, what there was it isn't compelling, but it's their relief bands. Now we're pretty expensive, they didn't share any test data. And the data that I could find is inconclusive, I think it's pretty easy to say that it's just, okay. So Dramamine, again, is really the side effects that worry me. And saying the same thing really with mal damar, except that one is in the United States, that's a prescription only drug. And so you need to be aware that if you want to use that, you do need to go talk to your doctor. And when you ask them about it, please be honest with them and say, I want to dive on this and see if they have any concerns based on your health history and their own expertise. So there is a a very big document from the NIH, if you want to read it, called the history of drug discovery for treatment of nausea and vomiting and the implications for future research. And this paper goes through the beginning of the treatment of nausea and vomiting, from very early on to 2018, when it was published, so it's actually pretty recent, you know, given everything, so I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. It's long. And but if you're interested in this, this stuff, if you do a lot of boat diving, and you're not really if you and you don't have good sea legs, like me, Well, except that I don't do a lot of boat diving. But if you do, you know, it would probably be worth at least scanning and understanding, you know, what options are out there and what effect they've had in the marketplace or in the industry. For my own diving, I'm going to make sure that I have B six and ginger. When I go on trips, I'm just going to integrate that into my dive into into my dive bag, say this is what I'm going to do. And then I actually have purchased some see bands, because they're cheap, why not have them. So I'm going to try those two. And if you know if I have any any experience with it, I'll let people know with regard to the relief band, because it's so expensive. I'm I really don't know I think if I'm going to go on a trip. And you know, if I were going to go to Bonaire, where most of the diving is shore diving, I probably wouldn't bother. You know, because you go boat diving for a day or but you're, you're, you get on the pier, get on the boat go out, do your dives come back in, and you actually don't really go very far most of the time. So it's, you know, not huge.
Unless you go into it, there's a spot on the coast, it's a little rougher, but I'm going to I might if I was going to do a live aboard and I was going to spend the money to do that, I would probably go ahead and drop the 250 bucks and buy the electronic relief band. Because if it works, it would be worth its weight in gold in terms of the experience that you're have the difference in the experience you'll have if you're comfortable on the boat versus if you're uncomfortable on the boat. So you know even it's it's almost like a it's just to me it would be worth the investment. If I was going to go on a liveaboard I will personally stay away from mal damar because the the the prescriptions or the side effects are so potentially deleterious to your dive experience that I'm like it's not worth it. I if I can't dive safely on it. I'm not gonna dive on it Dramamine like I said I have been diving on it and I don't have adverse reactions to it underwater. So you know and and if, if I were to go tomorrow based The last time I was on a boat was in 2018 and I did get sick. And so I feel like if I was going to go on a dive boat for a specific thing, like if I was going to spend all eight hours on the boat, have a day or longer I probably would do every single one of those things. Right I'm going to do be six ginger meditate before I get on the Bode get a relief band, probably a relief band on top of my, of my CB just because I really don't like to be seasick. And I'd probably take Dramamine too and until I figure out what that what my you know, what really does work. You know, I'd probably overdo it, you know, be six and ginger aren't gonna actually be anything. That's a big deal. The relief bands in the end, the sea bands aren't that there's nothing there got hurt anything. So the really the only thing that in that cocktail of seasickness cures that has any potential side effects is Dramamine. But me, based on my experience for myself, you know, that's a pretty good solution. So like I said, I'm going to stay away from aldemar. Just because of those the the potential side effects.
Wow. All right.
So there is a lot to think about when it comes to motion sickness in scuba diving. I guess the real takeaways are going through the things that you think might work for you in that long list and saying, what do you want to try? And what has your experience been on boats or in planes or in cars? If you're a new diver, and you haven't been scuba diving on a boat, don't let this scare you. Think about your experience in a car or on a plane. They're not 100% analogous, but they're close. Okay, that if you don't get carsick and you don't get plane sick, or airsick, you know, you've probably got a pretty low chance of having any trouble. So what do you do? Throw some B six and some ginger in your bag. Meditate, if you want to buy some c bands, because why not? And and see how you do. If you're like me, and you get seasick looking at a boat? And yes, I was in the Navy. And yes, it's ironic, I get it. But if you're if you are in that position, then look at what might work for you and make some adjustments accordingly. And you may have to say, Okay, I'm going to do every I'm going to do all the things. Again, if you go to a medication, please make sure that you do everything you can to keep yourself safe, including talking to your doctor about diving on that medication. And also try to dive on that medication in a controlled environment with a good safe dive buddy. All right, let's talk about the gear junkies garage.
Okay, so, you know, this is one of those things where I'm just going to tie it back to what we were talking about. I'm going to add, I have a little dry box that I put in my in my gear bag, and I'm just going to put Dramamine in it and our ginger gum Dramamine and be six. One thing you do have to watch about and just keep those as you know, something that I keep stocked. One thing you have to watch out for is whether or not your medications are expired. So if you put Dramamine in your dry bag, or in a dry box in your gear bag, and you're not paying attention to it, if you don't die for two years, you need to look at the expiration date, medication does that yes, the dates on medication may be conservative. But there is some evidence that medications degrade over time, or the effectiveness of medications can degrade over time. And it's worth checking into that and investing in fresh medicine, if you're fresh Dramamine or ginger gum or whatever, when you go before you go on a trip. But that's what I'm going to add to my gear. And for the tip of the week, this week, I just want to really focus on what is your experience going to be like, when you're in a new diving environment, if you haven't done a dive on a boat, try to do everything you can to create an analog of that experience. So and this goes beyond just whether or not your motion sick. It's how do we reduce our overall anxiety in this situation? So let's say we haven't been diving on a boat, let's say all of our diving was in our local reservoir, which is what we do here in in Colorado or or off a pier. Let's say you you live on the coast and you have the opportunity to dive in the ocean but you you dive off a pier, you did all your training off the pier. And now you're going to go on a dive boat. You know, for SSI, which is the agency that I I teach with, but you know, there are, there's a boat specialty, I don't think you have to get the specialty to dive off a boat, I don't have the boat specialty. And I've got a lot of dive boat or boat dives. But what you can do is say, all right, what kind of boat is it? You can email the company, if you don't live near them, you can email them and say, what kind of boat is this? What are the entry and exit techniques that are used? You know, are we doing giant strides? Are we you know, what are we doing back roll? Is it a Zodiac? And are you gonna back roll off of it? The first time I did a back roll, I back rolled off the boat, and then I hit my head on the bottom of it. So you know and that I was excited, I was new. I wasn't. I was about to say I wasn't paying attention. That's not really true. I simply didn't have the experience. And so if you're going to do something like that, if you're going to, let's say you're going to go on to zodiac, and get in the pool at your local dive shop and back roll, you know, just back roll off the deck into the water. Do it over and over again until it's boring. spend an hour back rolling. You know, just make sure when you back roll, you don't do a complete roll. So that you come up head first, under the under the boat, you want to do a back roll and then you want to swim away from the boat. Right? You don't want to roll so much that you're disoriented. Something to think about so I the the larger picture here is if you're going to do a dive in a new experience. Look at what you can do locally to replicate that experience as much as possible so that when you get on site, you're more confident. You're more calm, you have less anxiety, and you can focus on having a great dive. Alright, that's it. I didn't use my tip of the week bumper that is a drag. Oh well. You can contact the show at scuba Steve it up dive blog. com Visit us at the under pressure dive bomb calm for show notes and articles. Find the audio version of the show on your favorite pod catcher. You can find me on social media at scuba Steve up DB on Twitter and Instagram.
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