Success with peppermint – After Covid-19, smell training can help – Knowledge

Garlic – smells of nothing. Coffee – tastes like water. 80 percent of patients who contract Corona suffer from a loss of smell or taste. Targeted smell training can help.

The good news first: The sensory cells that have been damaged or destroyed by Corona can regenerate themselves. The brain has to relearn how, for example, peppermint smells. Laura Diem is senior neurologist at the Inselspital in Bern and doctor at the Covid consultation. She recommends smell training to patients who have lost their sense of smell and taste.

Smell training with essential oils

Working with essential oils. Four selected scents are smelled in succession for 10 to 15 seconds in the morning and evening. It is important that you imagine a specific situation with each fragrance. In addition, patients should also let an image of the scent play in front of their inner eyes while they are smelling it.

Sometimes a picture, for example a postcard of a rose, helps when practicing with the scent of the rose. It is trained with scent, emotion and image: «Peppermint reminds you of a cup of tea on the sofa. With a rose on the wedding day. Or with cinnamon at Christmas,” Diem suggests. In this way, the brain relearns how peppermint, rose and cinnamon smell.

Smell the coffee at home?

Of course you can also smell the ground coffee at home. “However, you never know exactly how long it has been stored in the can and has lost its smell,” says the doctor. Also, a lemon does not smell as intense as lemon essential oil, which is much more concentrated.

Fragrance sets for smell training can be bought in pharmacies or drugstores. The best way to train is with intense, recognizable scents. The neurologist recommends cloves, rose, lemon and eucalyptus to get you started with scent training. She advises against fragrance mixtures such as “Christmas”. “The brain has to relearn the individual scents, it’s overwhelmed with a mixture.” You can also practice with your partner’s favorite scent.

Train and be patient

And then it means: be patient and smell concentrated twice a day. After twelve weeks of training you should change the scents. “Even if a single scent is suddenly recognized, it’s best to replace it,” says the doctor.

With smell training, the brain learns to smell twice to four times as fast. A French The study was able to show that it was successful in 64.2 percent of the patients. In addition, the improvement in olfactory sense was greater in patients who exercised for more than 28 days than in those who exercised for less.

Unpleasant smell: A good sign

“If you suddenly smell an unpleasant odor during the smell training, you don’t have to worry,” says Diem. For example, the smell of smoke or rot is a sign that your sense of smell and taste are slowly coming back. The brain just has a misdirectionuntil it can recognize garlic as garlic again.