Or you can purchase these oils yourself at a place like Whole Foods. If that doesn’t sound appealing, you can choose to buy a smell kit that contains essential oils: the classic scents are rose, eucalyptus, clove and lemon. Drager, who had Covid-19 over the summer, extinguishes a candle every day and tries to smell the smoke. Rao, the restaurant critic, used spoiled milk. Dalton said.Īt one point during her smell training, Ms. An avid home cook, for example, might use certain spices from his pantry.Īlternatively, “some people have had a lot of success with things that smell bad,” Dr. Maybe one of them is a scented shampoo, a favorite cologne or lemons from the tree in your backyard. These are the fragrances that you will stick with throughout the initial phase of your training. To start, decide on four scents that are familiar to you and that evoke strong memories, the experts said. is a good way to make sure nothing else is missed,” he added. Once he removed the polyps, which were unrelated to Covid, his patient’s sense of smell improved greatly.
Sivam, an ear, nose and throat specialist and an assistant professor at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “I saw somebody recently who had smell dysfunction following Covid-19, and it turned out they had inflammatory nasal polyps,” said Dr. Dalton said wryly.īefore you begin, however, it is wise to rule out other conditions that could be affecting your sense of smell. Several studies, however, have demonstrated that smell training can help people who have lost some or all of their senses of smell to other viral illnesses like sinus infections - that’s why it is widely considered the best option for those who can no longer smell properly after contracting Covid. Robust studies examining the efficacy of olfactory training among Covid survivors have not yet been published. By the six-month mark, 95 percent of the patients had recovered their senses of smell. Though it’s unclear how many patients did the training, nearly one-quarter were still experiencing smell dysfunction 60 days after the onset of their symptoms. Lechien, a professor of otolaryngology at the University Hospital of Brussels and one of the authors of the study. All patients were encouraged to follow two daily sessions of smell training at home, said Dr. “You have to keep up with it.”įor many people, it appears to come back within weeks of being infected.Ī study published in January that recruited patients from 18 European hospitals found that among 1,363 coronavirus patients with olfactory dysfunction, most recovered their senses of smell within two months and 40 percent saw their ability to smell return within two weeks. “It’s not a quick fix,” said Chrissi Kelly, a member of the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research and the founder of AbScent, a nonprofit based in England and Wales that offers support and education to people around the world who have smell disorders. It involves sniffing several potent scents twice a day, sometimes for months, to stimulate and restore the olfactory system - or at the very least to help it function better. Smell training is more akin to physical therapy for your nose: tedious and repetitive. If the words conjure up images of a “Rocky” training montage - as they did for Tejal Rao, a New York Times restaurant critic who lost her sense of smell after contracting Covid last year - the reality is very different. What is smell training?įirst, let’s talk about what smell training is not. We spoke with several experts to demystify the process. But how exactly do you do it, and why should you bother? The recommended treatment for these conditions is smell training.
One meta-analysis published in September found that as many as 77 percent of those who had Covid were estimated to have some form of smell loss as a result of their infections. As the coronavirus continues to spread, there are increasing numbers of people who have either lost their senses of smell after contracting Covid or are struggling with parosmia, a disturbing disorder that causes previously normal odors to develop a new, often unpleasant aroma.
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