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Friday, August 8, 2008

Lost Your Sense of Taste and Smell? You CAN Get them Back if...


B'SD

7 Av 5768

We can lose our ability to detect smells from disease, injury and even from repeated sinus infections.

Anosmia is the medical term for the loss of a sense of smell. In Hebrew it's called tat'ranoot. But no matter which language you speak, that loss messes up your ability to enjoy food and to smell life-saving warnings such as leaking gas from defective appliances.

“A sense of smell in good working order is essential to our quality of life,” says sinusitis expert
Andrew Lane, M.D.

What's Dr. Lane doing about the problem? He's testing genetically altered mice with inflamed nasal tissue to understand how the problem can be cured. “And because we can turn on and off the inflammation in these mice, we really can mimic how the most overlooked and very disabling aspect of sinusitis, the loss of smell, or anosmia, plays out in people,” says Lane, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

New therapies are needed, he says, as an alternative to long-term steroids, which block the inflammatory chemical pathway but also have debilitating side effects, including loss of bone density, cataracts in the eye and weight gain.

The good news, Dr. Lane explains, is that when researchers stopped the drug-induced sinusitis, olfactory nerve cells rebounded and grew back within a couple of weeks, “proving that what we have is a mouse with reversible olfactory loss due to inflammation, which should speed up our learning more about the disease and testing new therapies. Ultimately, we hope to develop treatments that allow the sense of smell to recover, even in the presence of a hostile inflammatory environment due to sinusitis.”

Read all about it at
STUFFY NOSE.



As a woman with a decades-long history of sinus infections, I can clue you in to a more charming "reversible olfactory loss " reality than the story above. My organic foods vegetarian diet with lots of pure water, simple juices and organic tea have left me Sinus Infection-free for a few years now! None of the antibiotics I'd taken in the past had ever worked for me. WOW my nose was sore and so was I!


Now I'll share a secret: I lost my sense of tast and smell in that emergency life-saving brain surgery of 2005. But, ah, my neurosurgeon is flabbergasted that, these days, I can detect scents no matter how subtle they may be!

Why is he so perplexed? Because my age and surgical history indicate that I shouldn't be able to taste anything accurately, nor should I be able to differentiate herbs, flowers and other light scents (let alone the regular smells of daily life) with a sniff.

Trust me, my kitchen garbage can never fills to the top because I dislike the odor of day-old fruit and vegetable scraps.


Learn to heal your sinuses as I healed mine while recovering from brain surgery of all things! No steroids necessary, and you won't need a doctor.


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To your good health,

Yojeved Golani
Coping with a Medical Crisis?
Make the Changes You Need in Your Life.

1 comment:

Yocheved Golani said...

Thank you, Ken. I appreciate the generosity of readers such as you, who share information about healing and coping methods with people who desperately need the help. Best, Yoji