What’s for the word for when you get off a boat but still feel like you’re moving? It’s called land sickness, the opposite of sea sickness. A more severe version is mal de debarquement, French for “sickness from disembarkation,” abbreviated MdDS. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Land Sickness”
Great. You may remember this. After we gave a talk last week, a woman came up to you, a woman named Shelly, came up to you and was asking about the term for what you feel like when you get off a plane or you get off a boat. Yeah, and you’re still feeling the sense of motion. That’s right.
Yeah, and she wanted a word for that, and you had a term for it. Land of sickness is what I learned when I lived in the Caribbean. You know another term for it?
Well, I did some digging. There is something that translates from the French as disembarkment syndrome, mal de debarquement. Right, yeah, sure.
Which is now abbreviated as MDDS, and it’s an actual syndrome that’s relatively rare, affects women in their 40s and 50s, and it’s like a real medical problem that lasts for weeks or months or sometimes years.
So when they get off of vehicles, then they feel like the world is moving underneath their feet? Right, right.
And it may be that their bodies adjust to the motion of being on a vehicle, on a boat or a train or whatever, better than other people. But then it stays in this adjusted mode. They’re still compensating when they don’t need to.
Yeah. And so they get off of it and then they feel like they’re on a trampoline or something. Strange things.
