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What weird treatments should people who lost their taste from COVID try? — LessWrong

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[ Question ]

What weird treatments should people who lost their taste from COVID try?

by Maxwell Peterson

30th Jul 2021

1 min read

11

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.

What weird treatments should people who lost their taste from COVID try?

3Maxwell Peterson

1Maxwell Peterson

1Maxwell Peterson

1Maxwell Peterson

3Logan Zoellner

1Maxwell Peterson

2Logan Zoellner

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Jul 30, 2021

80

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!

[-]Steven Byrnes5y80

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

[-]Maxwell Peterson5y30

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?

5jimmy5y

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)

1Maxwell Peterson5y

Thanks!!

Jul 30, 2021

60

Sniffing strong essential oils seems to have helped me regain at least some of my smell and taste

[-]Maxwell Peterson5y10

Thanks! Can you recommend a brand?

2rosyatrandom5y

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.

Jul 30, 2021

40

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).

[-]Maxwell Peterson5y10

Thanks for that! I'd seen it mentioned in a tweet but we wondered about the veracity. Seeing another source is helpful.

Jul 30, 2021

30

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.

[-]Maxwell Peterson5y10

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?

2Logan Zoellner5y

n=1 isn't nearly enough data to answer that question unfortunately.

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