Jet lag: the business traveler's curse.

Those of us who travel frequently are aware of the symptoms: fatigue insomnia, disorientation, inability to concentrate, headache, aching joints, diarrhea and/or loss of appetite.

For those who are susceptible, the potential hit from jet lag is serious enough that some companies will not let executives sign binding documents within 24 hours after getting off a flight through several time zones. The worst-case scenario? Fly eastward over six time zones or more; depart at night; drink lots of coffee.

Eastbound travel tends to be somewhat more taxing than westbound for the body's biological clock, that elusive but very real mechanism that organizes physical functions and responses under a schedule as regular as sunrise and sunset. Generally speaking, the farther you fly at jet speeds, the more time needed for your natural cycles to adjust to an familiar daylight envelope.

It would be nice to believe we frequent flyers can condition ourselves to jet lag, but that is unlikely. Business travelers from either side of the Pacific seem equally hapless. Some try to roll into a little ball that can seep in two seats the rest usually pass out sitting straight up during the third movie, one arm extended into the aisle, fist clenched around three or four miniature liquor bottles with necks protruding between fingers like a set of brass knuckles.

Seasoned travelers in sales and marketing jobs make their own personal adjustments to jet lag. Ed Murphy, an executive who oversees a large organization's prodigious worldwide direct sales of audio/video/entertainment products. makes six or more overseas trips a year, most of them to Europe. "I arrange to arrive at my hotel by about 10 a.m.," says Murphy "I immediately take a hot shower, draw all the blinds and go to sleep until sometime in the late afternoon," He gives up a day to minimize the ravages of jet lag. "I rotund out long ago that if I didn't do this, I'd befalling asleep in afternoon meetings for the rest of the week,"

The toll that jet lag takes on business travelers has inevitably brought it under heavy attack. For more than a decade, the specialty of "chronobiology" has been getting more attention. Individual studies to identify both a prevention and cure for circadian dischronism have all followed generally similar paths. Currently, the most accessible approach is the set of complicated procedures put forth in the anti-jet-lag program devised by doctors in Chicago.

Meanwhile, dramatic successes in resetting the biological clocks of NASA astronauts by administering intense artificial light at programmed intervals suggest future methods for prevention.

Rhonda Pearson, R.N, works as a managed care consultant in Los Angeles.