Travel Related Illness
Is there a cure for children getting travel sick in the car?
There is not a cure for children getting travel sick. However, children can get accustomed to travelling by car, and therefore with time you will find that children adapt to travelling by car without getting sick. But there are a number of measures that you can take that will help the situation of travel sickness in children. For a start, better to have a full stomach. If they are travelling with an empty stomach they will be more susceptible to travel sickness. Secondly, entertaining them by keeping them focused on the surroundings but usually ahead of the car rather than to the sides. And games such as trying to identify oncoming cars, colours and I spy games are usually very good at this type of thing. If none of these measures work, one would have to discuss it with your doctor so that he can attempt to give you some medication that will help with the travel sickness.
What is deep vein thrombosis?
Deep vein thrombosis is a clot that forms within a vein, with the vast majority of cases it happens in the leg. Now, by definition, deep vein thrombosis happens in the deep system veins in the leg. There is another set of veins in the leg which we call the superficial veins that are also susceptible to thrombosis but are much less dangerous. So the difficulty with deep vein thrombosis is that because they happen deep in the leg, they are sometimes difficult to diagnose in their earlier stages.
What is the best way to avoid DVT?
The way to avoid Deep Vain Thrombosis is to maintain the circulation as fluid and as effective as possible in the legs. Veins do not have enough pressure within them in order to empty themselves simply by a pressure effect. The way we empty the blood coming from our legs, is to use our muscles: by squeezing on the veins, the blood gets pushed up, back into the general system. So, if we are sitting still for long periods of time, we are not effectively removing blood from the veins in the legs, and we need to move. That means: exercising your feet, moving your ankles, contracting your calves and, if possible, getting up and walking around. So, if you're doing a long-haul flight, you would need to get up and about every three quarters of an hour or an hour, in order to keep the circulation in your legs going. In addition to this, if you keep yourself well hydrated, your blood is going to be a little bit more fluid and with less of a tendency to coagulate. So it is important that we keep ourselves well hydrated. But furthermore, because of the risks of Deep Vein Thrombosis in long-haul flights, we will recommend the use of compression stockings, which will help press on the veins and prevent blood from accumulating in them, and we would often suggest the use of a junior aspirin, when and where possible, in order to reduce the risk of thrombosis even further.
