How we review motion sickness remedies
Every remedy gets one committed verdict, and every verdict has to be traceable to a named trial in motion sickness specifically — not nausea in general. The build fails if a verdict claims support it does not have. Where nobody has tested something, we say so instead of hedging.
The five verdicts
- YesTested for motion sickness and it held up.
- ProbablyReal trial support, but modest or from a single study.
- MixedTrials disagree — some found an effect, better-designed ones did not.
- UntestedNo one has tested this for motion sickness. It may still be sensible.
- NoTested for motion sickness and it did not beat a placebo.
The rule that does most of the work
Evidence must be about motion sickness. A great many remedies have reasonable support for nausea after surgery or during chemotherapy and have never been tested against the sensory conflict that makes you ill in a car. Quietly borrowing that evidence across conditions is the commonest way remedy articles mislead, and it is why our verdict for essential oils is “untested” while other sites call it effective.
The second rule follows from the first: “untested” and “no” are different claims. “Nobody has looked” is not the same as “we looked and it failed,” and collapsing the two is how confident-sounding advice gets built on nothing.
What the build enforces
These are not editorial aspirations — they are checks that stop a deploy:
- A verdict of yes or probably requires at least one named supporting trial.
- Mixed requires cited trials on both sides.
- Untested may not cite a supporting trial — if one exists, the verdict is wrong.
- No requires a trial that actually tested it and found nothing.
Citations
Every trial is checked against its own record — journal, year, sample size, what was measured — rather than against a summary of it. This is not a formality. While building these pages we found a widely repeated Cochrane review of acupressure for motion sickness that does not exist: the protocol was withdrawn in 2015 without ever being completed, and is still cited as though finished. We also had to correct our own headline citation after a search summary put a study in the wrong journal.
What we will not do
- Recommend doses. Where a trial used a specific amount we report that as a fact about the research, alongside a pointer to a pharmacist. We are not your clinician.
- Claim a medical review that did not happen. Pages carry a “medically reviewed” byline only where a clinician actually reviewed them.
- Hide a conflict of interest. Dizzout is an audio app, so our page on whether music helps carries an explicit disclosure — the trials there tested ordinary music, not our product, and the verdict says only what they found.
- Grade a competitor down for being a competitor. Acupressure bands, electrical wristbands and Samsung's own app are assessed on their evidence, which sometimes reads better than ours.
Corrections
If you find something wrong here we would rather know. Tell us and include the source — we will correct it and say what changed.
See it applied
Dizzout is not a medical provider and nothing on this site is medical advice. These pages summarise published research so you can weigh it; they cannot account for your health, your medicines or your pregnancy.