Sinusitis and Flying: What To Do If You Have To Fly
Posted: Friday, May 21, 2010
by Scott Siegel
Intergalactic Products LLC
You have sinusitis and you want to fly. The first rule is don't. The condition of sinusitis always precludes flying. The regular medical advice is don't fly if you have a sinus infection. Sinusitis and flying is a bad idea.
On the other hand, in a lot of cases it is not feasible to put off your flying. You may be required by circumstances to be somewhere and the only way to get there is to fly whether you have sinusitis or not.
With that in mind there are some things you can do to mitigate the pain and the possible damage you can do. Keep in mind that in revealing these things to you I am in no way suggesting you should fly with a sinus infection. The basic advice still holds, don't fly if you have sinusitis. But if you do have to fly there are a few things you can do.
First, to understand the reasons you should be wary of flying and to understand exactly why there are certain things you need to do here is a quick physics lesson to illustrate the problem.
If you have ever used a bottle of water on a plane you may have noticed something odd when you got off the plane. If you were drinking from the bottle during the flight, so that the bottle is less than half full, and you put the top on and forgot about it till you got off, when you grabbed the bottle as you were exiting the plane, you might have noticed something wrong.
You will see that the bottle has collapsed. It was like you stepped on it. That illustrates what the change of pressure on an airplane can do when air cannot pass freely. When you put the top on the bottle, you in essence created a blockage keeping air out of the bottle. The air pressure drops when the plane is at altitude. When the air pressure returns to normal as you land the increased pressure presses on the bottle, but there is not enough pressure in the bottle to press back because of the cap, the blockage so the pressure differences collapses the bottle.
That is exactly what happens to your sinuses. Your sinuses are spaces filled with air. Air always wants to equalize to the external air pressure. If there is a blockage, which there is when you have a sinus infection, the air cannot equalize. The external pressure will press on your sinuses and squeeze them just like the bottle. That is why you feel pain and pressure when you fly.
What can you do if you have to fly? How can you minimize the pain and damage. To keep the bottle from collapsing you needed to keep the cap off. You needed to keep the air open to freely equalize to the pressure in the plane at altitude and on the ground. That's exactly what you have to do with your sinuses. You have to keep the cap off, keep the airways open.
The only effective way to do that on a plane is to take a decongestant. Take it about a half hour before the plane is going to take off. That way by the time you reach altitude the decongestant should be in your system opening your air passages of your sinuses. Make sure you take one that will last long enough for the whole flight plus some. If the decongestant wears off before you land you could rebound and have a more severe blockage than you did before. If that happens in flight you are in trouble.
If you have a two hour flight take at least a four hour decongestant. The other thing you can do during the flight is to drink plenty of water. Keep yourself hydrated. By the way, Vodka, and Diet Coke don't hydrate you. They dehydrate you and consuming alcohol while taking decongestants is a bad idea anyway. Drink water. Chewing gum while ascending and descending might help too.
The bottom line is, if you have severe sinusitis don't fly. If you do have to fly, you can mitigate the problem to some extent using decongestant and keeping yourself hydrated.
Scott Siegel is a researcher, author and editor. He has done extensive research on the sinusitis flying connection. For more great information on how to solve your sinus problems visit http://www.sinusprobleminfo.com
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