About one-third of people will experience motion sickness at some point. I won't. But if my wife is floating in a swimming pool and a malnourished leafhopper lands in the water, the resulting ripple is enough to turn her green.
Speaking of green, I coughed up plenty of it for a once-in-a-lifetime snorkeling trip to Hawaiʻi. Only to discover that snorkeling, one of my all-time favorite activities, made her seasick. And I'm not talking open ocean snorkeling. No, it was a well-protected cove with all the wave action of a birdbath.
Goodbye, Maldives. Hello, Arizona.
Motion sickness is one of those annoying problems that everyone understands because almost everyone has experienced it. Yet despite millions of miserable passengers, cruise ship customers, and airline travelers, drug development for motion sickness has barely budged since the 1970s. That would be fine if there were decent motion sickness drugs. There aren't. The existing armamentarium of medicines falls somewhere on the spectrum between "suck" and "really suck," and it has occupied that territory through Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. That's a lot of wars. And a lot of spewing.
Finally, something different
In 2025, the FDA approved tradipitant (Nereus), the first new prescription drug for motion sickness in more than 40 years. Surprisingly, the drug's mechanism isn't new at all. In fact, drugs that work exactly the same way have been around for more than twenty years.
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