Morning Sickness: No Reliable Relief for Mommys-To-Be
Research fails to pin down a morning sickness cure but docs say there's hope.
Sept. 8, 2010— -- "Morning sickness" was more like "all the time sickness" for Dr. Donnica Moore, founder and President of Sapphire Women's Health Group in Branchburg, N.J.
It plagued her every single day of her pregnancy.
"In most women, morning sickness if mild - annoying, but it goes away by the thirteenth week. For my second pregnancy, I threw up every single day for nine months," she says.
By the end of it, Moore swore by having plain crackers by her bedside that she would nibble on before even getting out of bed in the morning.
"That way you make sure your stomach is not completely empty before you get up and moving," she says.
Other women swear by ginger tea, vitamin B-6 supplements, or anti-nausea pressure point bracelets. For the more adventuresome, internet discussion forums are chock-full of personal remedies such as salt and vinegar potato chips, apple cider vinegar tea, and wheat germ concoctions.
But do any of these remedies actually work? Do all of them work, but only for some women?
A recent review evaluated the effectiveness of some of the most popular morning sickness remedies: ginger, acupressure and acupuncture, anti-nausea medication, and vitamin B6 supplements.
Information from 27 trials involving more than 4,000 women provided no consistently effective treatment for morning sickness. Ginger and acupressure on the P6 pressure point (on the inner wrist) had modest effect, but nothing seemed to work consistently well.
Does this mean that women suffering from morning sickness are out of luck? Not necessarily, obstetricians say, but they may have to do a little trial and error of their own in order to find a remedy that works for them.
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