Of the five senses, smell is the least studied. However, without odors life is certainly not impossible… just incredibly painful. We take stock of anosmia, which has become the king symptom of the Covid pandemic.
What causes one day to suffer from a smell disorder? You will have noticed that a stuffy nose goes with all the sores of winter. But stuffy nose does not necessarily mean loss of smell. It is paradoxical but real. There are also known cases such as those of smokers who smell less and less well or rather who are similar to this phenomenon, very curious but which each of us knows, from habituation to one’s own smell… A real curiosity of nature…
It took the pandemic the covid virus to discover one of these extremely unpleasant complications sometimes the only warning sign of infection. The world has discovered the learned name for the loss of smell: anosmia.
Head trauma, the main cause
Apart from the infection, the cause is first the cranial traumatism… and then, especially the age. From birth, we lose 1% of our abilities every year. Do the count, the fifty-year-old perceives half as much odor as the newborn, which is a lot. Added to this are certain diseases such as diabetes or Parkinson’s, toxic causes such as certain vapours, brain tumors or malformations. But to be realistic the first cause before the Covid was by far the presence of polyps deep in our nose.
The polyp is a benign tumor whose inconvenience is the space it occupies. Too much space in the nose equals a stuffy nose. This is the case for many allergic people. For them, there are local anti-inflammatories that are perfectly capable of improving the symptom. We can simply remove them, these polyps but it’s a surgical procedure, so we think a little before.
Smell problems also have another originality. Unlike vision and glasses, hearing and prostheses, there is no replacement device, but to know if medical treatment is necessary, medicine has developed an olfactometer… A device that allows to measure the sense of smell and especially the real deficit. You are offered to breathe in 5 types of odor, some unpleasant, at different concentrations and the device calibrates your performance.
And you have to keep in mind that the loss of the sense of smell is often as brutal as its recovery, very often, without you realizing it. This is the case in the majority of attacks due to Covid.
No specific drugs
There are no specific medicines for the sense of smell, rather rehabilitation techniques. These are amusing methods which consist of inhaling vials of various but very distinctive scents, such as rose, mint or lemon, several times a day, for ten seconds and for three months.
It’s quite effective… and without side effects!
It doesn’t work in all cases because there are people, especially with severe head injuries, who never get their sense of smell back.
From a medical point of view, the sense of smell has a role apart from the pleasure of perfumes. It is moreover very often when it runs out that we become aware of the importance it plays in some of our most common activities: the regulation of food, the apprehension of our olfactory environment, pleasant or embarrassing, or the detection of dangerous odors. And then remember “the wing or the thigh” and poor Louis De Funes gastronomic critic deprived of taste…