In 1998 and 1999, Teraporn Vutyavanich, Theerajana Kraisarin, and Rung-Aroon Ruangsri in Thailand showed that ginger alleviated nausea in pregnant women. Vutyavanich and his colleagues found that the group of pregnant women who took ginger capsules reported significantly fewer nausea symptoms and vomiting episodes than the group who only received the placebo. Vutyavanich and his team’s study at Chiang Mai University in Chiang Mai, Thailand, was one of the earliest to investigate and support the use of ginger as an effective treatment for relieving pregnancy-related nausea and vomiting.

In its 1993 decision Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the US Supreme Court established the Daubert Standard for evaluating the admissibility of scientific knowledge as evidence in US federal courts. When it began in trial court, the case addressed whether or not Bendectin, an anti-nausea medication taken during pregnancy, caused birth defects. However, after the trial court dismissed the case for lack of admissible evidence, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. advanced through appeals courts to the US Supreme Court, where the Justices defined the criteria by which scientific knowledge, which for them included a least theories based on evidence, expert testimony from scientists, and scientific techniques, could be introduced and used in court cases as evidence. The Daubert Standard states that the judge of a case is responsible for determining what claims are admissible as scientific knowledge and as evidence in the case. The admissibility should be determined by the falsifiability of the claims, by whether or not they had passed peer reviewed, by the general scientific acceptance of the claims, and for techniques, by their error rates of the techniques. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. set a landmark precedent in the US judicial system and influenced most subsequent legal cases that appealed to science to establish facts in trials.