How Reliefband Works

Do you suffer from motion or morning sickness? It’s awful to live with, isn’t it! If you’re new to Reliefband®, we believe you’re about to meet your favorite piece of technology. Reliefband® is wearable technology that puts you in control of treating nausea, retching, and vomiting associated with morning sickness and motion sickness—without drugs and without delay. How It Works Reliefband® is worn on the wrist, with the band holding the device to the underside of the wrist. When it’s turned on, it releases a specific pattern of pulses, like beats on a drum, that stimulate a nerve under the skin called the median nerve. These pulses create a signal, which pulses through the body’s nervous system to the part of the brain that controls nausea, retching, and vomiting. This area is known as the dorsal vagal complex. The pulses quiet and normalize the nerve messages that travel along what’s called the vagus nerve, from the brain to the stomach. This relieves the symptoms of nausea, retching, and vomiting caused by motion or morning sickness. Reliefband®. It’s stunning technology that will change your life, so you can live life in full motion.

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Europe In Summer

Europe calls to Americans — maybe it’s the history, or perhaps the romance. Whatever it is, its pull is nearly irresistible. Those of us who suffer from motion sickness find the pull isn’t as strong given the nausea, retching, and vomiting we experience when traveling by car, plane, train, boat or even, on a bad day, an elevator. However, it’s summer and time to get our vacay on! Don’t let motion sickness ruin your day (or your vacay); instead, start living your life. With Reliefband® on the wrist, you control those nasty symptoms, and you’ll find travel isn’t the nausea-inducing torture it used to be. If you’re ready to plan your visit, we have a few favorite spots to share. Majorca is a Spanish island drenched in ancient ruins, mountains, and beach resorts. It is a land to suit nearly every preference. Pack lots of sunscreen and relax. Corfu provides a bit of the touristy beach vibe, but primarily, it’s an island that introduces you to the slow pace of life in Greece. If you want to immerse yourself in the Greek culture, this is the perfect spot. Scotland, the land of lochs, moors, kilt-wearing men, castles, golf courses, bagpipes, and cities and landscapes so beautiful, it melts the heart. No one ever regrets a trip to Scotland. Really, there are a thousand spots around Europe that would delight anyone looking for a place to land for a week or two. The point is to get out there and enjoy life. Don’t let the misery of motion sickness stop you from trying new things. Live your life in full motion!

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VR – Not Just For Games

Virtual Reality (VR) is tops with gamers, but it’s also used in ways unimagined just a few short years ago. VR simulations in the military enhance the training one goes through to become a medic or a pilot, a tank driver or even a combatant. Businesses use VR simulations to improve skillsets such as machine operation, sales, or understanding and use of a product. Teachers find the world of Virtual Reality to be a boon to the translation of concepts, and it’s just a fun way to learn. Who doesn’t want to interact with whales during fifth period? But, VR-related nausea can put the kibosh on the excitement and benefit of experiencing the world through Virtual Reality. Reliefband® offers a quick, natural way to treat the symptoms of nausea, retching, and vomiting sometimes associated with motion sickness from playing or training in the virtual world. So go, have fun in VR—jump out of airplanes, swim with turtles, or float in space. Do it all and bonus, no puking!

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Say Yes To Travel, No To Motion Sickness

Traveling adds depth and perspective to our lives. Saying yes to travel opportunities is fun! But motion sickness, the kind some of us experience when we fly, or ride in a car or boat, can be enough to stop us from going across town—forget about going across the country (or the world). The answer is simple: Reliefband®. Worn on the wrist, it’s a fast, drug-free way to treat the nasty symptoms of nausea, retching, and vomiting that keep us from living life as we’d like. Once our motion sickness is under control, the world is ours to explore. Following is a bucket list of destinations we’ve started for 2017. We invite you to add to it in the comments. Mont St.-Michel is an old abbey off of the coast of Normandy, France. When the tide comes in, it’s an island surrounded by water, seeming to float on the sea. Once the tide is out, you can make your way there and walk the paths of monks. Next winter, we hope to sleep on ice at the ICEHOTEL in Sweden. It’s a work of art, rebuilt every year in a few short weeks. However, we hear they’re going to attempt to keep it open year-round, with the help of solar panels to keep it cool. Either way, we can’t wait. The Ithaa Undersea Restaurant in the Maldives is stunning. You dine under a glass dome surrounded by, yes, the sea. Stingrays and other creatures of the deep are your companions for a pricey but once-in-a-lifetime meal. Whitehaven Beach in Australia is blindingly white. Hence the name. They say it’s 89% silica, which accounts for its color. We don’t know if that’s true, but who doesn’t want to walk on such soft, white sand? The Arashiyama Bamboo Grove in Japan is a magical place in which to stroll. The sound of the wind making its way through the bamboo is unique and not to be missed. Well, this is our bucket list so far. What’s on your list? Remember, this is the year to change your life. Treat the symptoms of motion sickness, and go! Hope to see you out there.

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Nausea And The Bad Old Days

At Reliefband®, we’re well-versed in the treatment of nausea, retching, and vomiting related to motion and morning sickness. We’re proud to bring our wearable technology to market—a device which provides drug-free, fast relief from the nausea, retching, and vomiting indicated above. Because this is our world, we have an intense interest in not only what’s happening today in the area of relief of nausea and vomiting, but also in the treatment history of these symptoms. Rachael Russell, a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester in the UK, wrote her thesis on the subject: Nausea and Vomiting: A History of Signs, Symptoms and Sickness in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Her work is thorough and quite long (it is a thesis, after all), but we recommend it if the topic interests you. We do want to share just a few of the fascinating bits that explain how nausea was treated back in the day, though we are not advocating for these practices. With apologies to Ms. Russell for not sharing her entire manuscript: While Darwin tried raisins, others stuck to tea and dry biscuits. A light, bland diet was the favoured [food] option. Brandy was a seemingly popular [alcohol] option . . . Dry champagne, sometimes iced, was also chosen to combat nausea and vomiting at sea, as it was considered able to revive energy and be retained in the stomach when everything else caused irritation. According to Dr Andrew Wilson . . . the reason for its success was its carbonic acid gas content. Frederic Carpenter Skey (1798-1872), a surgeon at St Bartholomew’s, recommended to the sea-cadet Henry Knight (b. 1848) that he use quinine – ‘more efficient if given in port or sherry about 2 thirds of a glass.’ According to John King, a surgeon aboard a Nantucket whaler, he kept ‘ether’, a teaspoonful of which he mixed in wine for treating sea-sickness. There were also numerous patent remedies that passengers could choose from . . . These remedies often contained alcohol, sugar and opium. Most remedies were to be ingested and were thought to act directly on the abdomen. There were far fewer local applications, such as that patented by Pierre Molinari in 1858. Molinari claimed to prevent sea-sickness by adding to vinegar the following ingredients: rue, thyme, mint, rosemary, absinthe, turmeric, the green husks of walnuts, rocou, poppy heads and potash. Wadding was then soaked in this mixture and placed on the pit of the stomach. In his 1857 lectures on digestion Thomas King Chambers suggested that ‘[t]he best remedy for healthy persons to take is very frothy bottled porter: if it does not in every case prevent the vomiting, yet the prostration afterwards is certainly avoided, and the ejecta are not so disagreeable.’ Chambers also recommended chloroform to prevent the violent straining during vomiting, though lamented that it would not prevent nausea. In his text on How to Travel, for example, Thomas Knox advised his readers that: Many persons will tell you that it is an excellent thing to be sea-sick, as you are so much better for it afterwards. If you are a sufferer you will do well to accept their statements as entirely correct, since you are thereby consoled and soothed, and the malady doesn’t care what you think about it, one way or another. Chemical formulas were rarely noted to have been successful. Creosote, an anti-emetic, was often mentioned. However, it was also criticised as, given in the wrong doses, it could make the sickness worse. James Henry Bennet argued in 1857 that chemical treatments were more commonly unsuccessful because they were expelled from the stomach before having the chance to work. He therefore suggested opium injections into the rectum. This was able to bypass the stomach and act directly on the nerves, encouraging sleep. And with that, we draw this peek into the past to a close. We’re grateful that science has brought us to this point! With a Reliefband® on the wrist, we simply push a button to treat our symptoms. Thanks to Rachael Russell for the historical perspective.      

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