Retraining Smell

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Anchor lead: There are specific training strategies to help regain smell after Covid infection, Elizabeth Tracey reports

If you’ve lost your sense of smell due to Covid-19, you may have seen kits for sale that purport to help you regain it by regular sniffing of essential oils. Andrew Lane, an otolaryngologist at Johns Hopkins, says there are four scents that are typically utilized.

Lane: It’s rose, lemon, cloves, and eucalyptus. This was something that the group in Germany who originally came up with this, had picked them for a reason, that they had represented classes of odors in some scheme. Other people have said that it doesn’t have to be those, have even said how about smelling some household items might be just as good. Smelling coffee, vinegar, or smelling lemons. That’s better than nothing. We don’t really understand how this works so there’s probably nothing magical about those four.   :29

Lane says the strategy of regular retraining might make sense however, and it won’t cause any harms, so it is well worth attempting. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.