Sucking ginger candies? Chomping Saltines? Wearing those unattractive wristbands with the plastic knobs that exert pressure just so and promise to calm pregnancy nausea? Check, check, check.
Alas, none of them worked for me.
An entire industry has sprung up around keeping pregnant women from upchucking their innards — pregnancy teas, special Vitamin B6 supplements, aromatherapy. There are even Preggie Pops — choose lollies or lozenges — which have garnered a thumbs-up in reviews on Amazon.com (A Chicago customer enthused: “Don’t know how I’d make it through work, or life for that matter, without these!”) Yet if you’ve ever been pregnant and despaired that none of the anti-morning sickness remedies really seemed to work, you might be interested in a new report released Wednesday that proves you right.
Irish, British and U.S. researchers collaborated to look at 27 studies involving 4,041 women who tried to allay their nausea using a variety of treatments including acupressure, acustimulation, acupuncture, ginger, vitamin B6 and prescription drugs. Their findings, released Wednesday in the Cochrane Library, reveal that some of the interventions such as acupressure and acustimulation (which relies on needles to transmit an electric current) yielded “limited” benefit. Others, like acupuncture — which has become increasingly popular among pregnant women— showed no significant benefit. Ginger, often recommended as a homeopathic option, was inconsistent in the degree to which it helped; it even made some women sick.
Bottom line: Suffer through it.