Kansas City Blog

It's odd that jet-lag needs a cure. It does not seem like the sort of thing for which there should be a cure. When it's been a long time since you've traveled it can become easy to see jet lag as a psychological weakness, not a physical one. All you've got to do is tell yourself to "buck up, you've done nothing but sit for ten hours." But as all weary travelers know, jet-lag is as real as any virus or condition.

The problem all has to do with natural sleep cycles and circadian rhythms. As doctors and passengers both know, the human body doesn't take too kindly to messing with its sleep and the current drugs on the market for jet-lag, like Xanax and other benzodiazepines, have to be strong enough to overcome the body. Unfortunately, that also makes them a little too strong and then there's that chemical-dependency issue that comes with heavy use of these drugs.

The new supposed cure involves working with the body, or more specifically, already being produced by the body.
According to "Transient Insomnia," a report just published in medical journal The Lancet, the best way to cure jet-lag may be reading articles with names like "Transient Insomnia."

I kid. I kid.  

The cure may be a new drug is called tasimelteon, which is undergoing trials that have so far been successful. According to the BBC: "In trials on 450 people who went to bed five hours earlier than normal to replicate crossing into a different time zone, those who took the drug enjoyed between 30 minutes and nearly two hours more sleep than volunteers who received a dummy pill."

For its base, tasimelteon uses the natural sleep hormone melatonin. There's already a variety of over-the-counter medications that use melatonin to help people sleep better. You can go to any grocery store and find a bottle of melatonin pills among the vitamins and calcium supplements.

Melatonin, which is produced naturally by the body during nighttime (or what the body believes is nighttime), has no addictive properties or side-effects but it also has a very short half-life and there's no real conclusive evidence to show it helps improve sleep. Some people see it as just a placebo. As a person who's been taking melatonin when traveling for a couple years, my thoughts on it are this: It will help you fall asleep but it does nothing to actually keep you asleep. Overall though, it's been a godsend. I was able to crisscross two continents within a period of three days with almost no jet-lag. (Note: I'm a blogger not a doctor. If you have any medical problems for God's sake ask your doctor and don't depend on me for what ails ya.)

Tasimelteon looks to be a more potent version of melatonin but really what it seems to confirm is that melatonin is not just a placebo but works. — Owen Morris