AN INNOVATIVE solution to tackle the symptoms of nausea and vomiting could literally be music to the ears of anyone keen to avoid using medication.

Thanks to a Basingstoke-based company, DAVAL, these unpleasant conditions can hopefully be eased by using a medically-trialled and tested product called Nevasic – an audio engineered medical pro¬ gramme which uses special audio pulses and frequencies to provide relief, delivered in a ‘jacket’ of music to make using it a pleasant experience.

David Gosley, along with fellow director Jo Harris, has been selling variations of the programme for the last 12 years, initially on audio tape and more recently on CD. Now, Nevasic is available as an iPhone application.

David said that there is sound science behind Nevasic – but he readily admits that despite clinical research, which proves that Nevasic works, people are often sceptical that an audio programme might work for them.

He explained: “Travel sickness, morning sickness, hangover sickness and other forms of nausea can often be traced back to a feeling of imbalance triggered by receptors in the inner ear. This in turn leads to feelings of nausea – your brain’s way of saying ‘I can’t cope with this’ – which can lead on to vomiting. ”

“Nevasic’s engineered audio pulses and frequencies interfere with the process and restore stability, hence relieving the feelings of sickness.

“If we played these pulses and frequencies on their own, they wouldn’t form a listenable experience, so we jacketed the core working programme with ordinary music – the sugar to put in the medicine, as it were”.

The product was originally developed as a sea-sickness solution by a partner director in Australia, where it was tested in conjunction with the Australian Navy, Sydney-Hobart yacht race crews and with willing passengers and crews on small cruise ships. David and Jo got involved with it 12 years ago.

David said: “It was already labelled up as an audio cassette for travel sickness and had notched up considerable anecdotal success stories.

“When I took it on, my job was to market it, with my first step being to get it objectively researched and proven.

“Imperial College London successfully trialled Nevasic for motion sickness, but though customer feedback, we began to realise that Nevasic was working for a broader range of nausea conditions.”

Following initial evidence that it can provide relief for pregnant women suffering from morning sickness, Winchester and Eastleigh NHS Trust studied the programme in conjunction with moth¬ ers attending the Andover NHS Birth Centre.

The study showed that nine out of 10 women experienced a reduction or elimination of their symptoms. And now there are high hopes that cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy – which causes nausea as a side- effect – can benefit from using Nevasic.

“A clinical trial, which has been commissioned by the National Cancer Research Institute, is set to start at the end of this summer,” said David.

“Our product will be run against a placebo for a limited time, sufficient for the experts to evaluate whether there has been a benefit for the patients.

“If the result from the chemotherapy trial comes out positive, it could go worldwide very quickly as there are no manufacturing, transportation or language barrier problems.”