Carsickness - do the medicines work (at all)?

[Octaviapink]

3 yo DD is massively carsick (as was I and my mother before me) - she will be sick within five minutes or less once in a car. Now normally this isn't a problem as we don't have a car and we walk or cycle everywhere in the city (she's also sick on buses: don't ask me about the time I had to take her and DS to A&E for a problem he had - a nightmarish forty minute bus journey there and worse on the way back).

We're going to the PILs for a couple of days in the summer - last time we went she was sick 13 times in a 20 minute car ride. (One of the reasons we only go once a year!) So has anybody had any experience with the various medications out there? Now that she's 3 I think she's allowed to take stuff but I remember them never doing much for me - have they got any better? What do you recommend?

I have a faint hope that she will grow out of it, but I never did (still feel sick on buses etc)

Another non-medical thing which helps dd (and me) is ginger tea to sip - a couple of slices of fresh ginger, pour over boiling water, then strain into a small bottle when its cool.

Non-medical trick that my old primary school headmistress used to use on the kids pre-school trips. (Disclaimer... probably illegal nowadays). She would arrive in the classroom with a big brown bottle of anti travel sickness medicine and a large spoon. Everyone would line up for a dose, making suitably faces as it went down. I found out much later that the 'medicine' was water with a dash of pink food colouring... No-one was ever sick. :)

Yes they work, I've had to take them most of my life and only grew out of it in my late twenties. However I've always found them enormously sedating. So if you can plan longer journeys towards the evening or around a nap time and can give her a tablet a little while before hand it may turn out quite well. But other things from my horrendously carsick ten year old self include the following:

Keep her cool almost to the point of cold. Being too warm was a major trigger for me.
No reading or in car dvd's, hand held game consoles etc. They'll trigger the body/eye balance discord immediately.
She's very young but if you can get her to close her eyes it may help, the alternative for me as I got older was to fix my eyes on the white line at the side of the road and just watch it zoom by. The trick is to either have something travelling in tandem with the car to focus on, or to remove all potential distractions all together.
Sitting in the front helped with that too, as you can focus on the road, not what's happening inside the car.

Hope you get some relief, motor travel was miserable for me for decades!

I get terrible car sickness and I have problems with my inner ear. The only thing I have found is to sit in the front, fresh air and an audio book. If I can get my mind to concentrate on something else rather than being car sick it does help. I still feel rubbish but it's not so bad. I find it better to keep my eyes shut and shut out all visual sensory information. When I get on a ferry I have to basically keep my eyes shut for the whole trip.
Bands were useless, anti-histamine knocked me out for hours and the anti-emetic I got didn't really work either.

Front seat is not illegal (though I left the UK 3 years ago). Not all vehicles have a back seat.

Mint and ginger can both help. I used both when pregnant

My kids are nightmare car travellers. It's got better over the years. my car travel routine is now
travel sweets to suck for the journey from the chemist (not to many as all the glucose can cause dihorea)
the wrist bands and we use 'kwells' travel tabs. It's the only way we can get anywhere without having to stop every 2 minutes and losing my mind! Good luck.

Ds1 always travels in front seat and never had milk before travelling. He was given phenergan by our doctor when we flew to Dubai last year (the previous year he was sick 6 times on way out and double that on way back). Phenergan worked for six hours then started to wear off and he was sick . On the way back I kept the max dose up all the way and he wasn't sick at all ... he couldn't walk though as he was so drugged up but was so happy that he hadn't been sick!

Seat in the front, windows open, mints in the mouth, looking straight ahead (or sleeping!) makes it better for us (my son is pretty bad, too, as was I, and still am, especially in London buses). ANother strange cure is cloves - but not every child is willing to chew them. Might work for you, though :)