I'd maybe make a hypothesis that a large portion of the space is "bad" smelling stuff: smoke or garbage. When people had covid-induced parosmia, it almost always seemed to be bad smelling stuff.

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jsrcout 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know someone whose sense of taste was ruined by a small stroke. He said basically everything tastes like old gym socks now. That would suck so bad.

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exr0n 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Super interesting! That would make sense, because a lot of the nose is presumably dedicated to smelling evolutionarily-relevant smells, most of which are "smells bad, avoid this". The method is very crude right now, but maybe with more fine-grained targetting we could better tune the smell profile.

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robrain 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Still have it, intermittently. A sort of nameless-but-familiar "chemical" smell that comes and goes, along with any sense of taste. That is, I have bad days with no taste, just a chemical smell. Other days I have a pretty good sense of smell, generally with a good sense of taste.

Intriguingly some of the really unpleasant smells never get through to me - I could probably work at a sewage works now. Worryingly I have next to no ability to smell burning, though I do now get the smell of natural gas (or the additive used to make it smell).

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m_kos 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There has been promising work on olfactory training, which you can do very inexpensively at home. If you can, I would consider seeing any ENT first to rule out polyps, etc.

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robrain 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks for the info. I'm on top of it (in the ways you described) but still appreciate it and maybe someone else will see your comment.

	▲	m_kos 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Good luck!

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shaky-carrousel 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is something I'm still testing, so take it with a bucket of salt, but I've found that exposing myself to very strong samples of things that I was unable to smell made something click again and I started to smell them again. Seems like something in there needs to be retrained to odors.

	▲	robrain 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's the basic method of retraining. I've got a bunch of essential oils in tiny jars and I regularly take a 20 second sniff of each whilst thinking strongly about the smell in context. For example, when I smell the lavender oil I recall the garden at my grandma's house which obviously was full of lavender. It's definitely helping, but there are still a lot of gaps.
	▲	Terr_ 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm convinced that over the decades we'll continue to be a little surprised but just how much of our body-machinery is doing jobs of self-calibration, regulation, and safety-interlocks.

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teuobk 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That was exactly my thought when reading the article and my personal experience with Covid. For a couple weeks, I perceived a persistent smell of something burning.

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0_____0 7 hours ago | parent [-]

A smell of burning was how I suspected I had COVID the last time around. I was around some machines, I had to have someone else sniff around and let me know that nothing was actually burning.

	▲	rclkrtrzckr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Same here, and it's still there. I can't smell or taste a random set of stuff, like cinnamon, poop/farts. What annoys me most is that female genitalia just taste like nothing, literally... In addition to this, I sometimes smell scents that do not exist.