My friend had COVID in September 2020 and never got her taste back. What low-risk random things should she try doing to get it back? Recommendations need not be backed by anything stronger than “a friend of a friend heard…” or “I saw it on TikTok”—I’m looking for a broad library of things for her to consider trying. She is sane and is not the type to drink bleach or whatever, so don’t worry about recommending questionable things.
Two treatments I’ve heard of through unverified interwebs:
Ivermectin (yeah I follow that guy’s YouTube, there’s lots of study about it but afaik the usefulness for smell loss in particular is anecdotal). The mechanism would likely be that it clears out residual viral particles/pieces of cellular garbage that are causing damage.
LSD (apparently a small dose helped a guy? I think this story is on Zvi’s latest covidpost.) Obviously a lot more risk with this one and I would guess it could only work by increasing sensory output because psychedelics. (This kinda tracks with the essential oils suggestion? Sniffing stuff a lot could rewire some neurons I guess.)
Good luck!
If LSD works, I would guess that it works because low-level sensory processing normally has its learning rate set to ~0 in adults, but LSD increases the learning rate, allowing it to rewire and adapt itself, and in particular adjust its connections to ignore dead neurons or whatever. That’s kinda uninformed speculation after reading this
Thanks. I had googled Ivermectin a bit yesterday but everything was talking about treating chronic fatigue. Is Ivermectin even a thing for smell/taste at all (anecdotally)? Sounds like you have heard of its use for those specific symptoms?
reddit.com/r/ivermectin talks about it for this purpose (1 2 3 4).
To add an anecdote, I know someone who started taking ivermectin two weeks after getting covid, and their sense of smell returned after ~55hr (3 doses)
Thanks!!
Sniffing strong essential oils seems to have helped me regain at least some of my smell and taste
Thanks! Can you recommend a brand?
I just used whatever I had on the shelf—the only recommendation I would make is to go for strong, personally-familiar scents. Pine tree, cinnamon, lavender, jasmine etc.
Psychedelics, maybe.
I saw someone tweet a successful report of using LSD for this purpose.
Edit: went back to search for it and there seem to be many people discussing this and quite a few have found it helpful (much moreso for smell than taste, but of course the two are closely related and I believe that loss of smell was a more common experience).
Thanks for that! I’d seen it mentioned in a tweet but we wondered about the veracity. Seeing another source is helpful.
I just started added massive quantities of the few things I could still taste/smell (in my case this meant a lot of ginger and chili pepper) until my sense of smell came back.
Thanks for your answer. Are you saying the strong flavors seemed to help kick your sense of smell into coming back faster? Or were they just a way of riding it out until the sense came back by itself?
n=1 isn’t nearly enough data to answer that question unfortunately.