Welcome Fragrance
So, back in October I finally managed to catch covid, or at least something very similar. I took my own advice and dosed myself up heavily with vitamin C, vitamin D and Chinese herbs and luckily after a week or and some serious amounts of sweating, I managed to get myself back to normal. Almost.
For me, other than the immense boredom of not being able to go outside, the most disconcerting symptom was losing my sense of smell. I don’t mean having a blocked nose, like you may experience with a common cold, instead I had totally free flowing nostrils that couldn’t smell a thing. Not fresh coffee, not eucalyptus oil, not even burning incense. Nothing. It was a strange sensation having smoke flowing up my nostrils but my brain not being able to detect it. Perhaps this was all a method of self-preservation due to the amount I was sweating but as this symptom lasted the longer than the others, I’m not so sure.
Smell is an under-appreciated sense. It is true that most other animals do have a more acute sense of smell. Dogs for example are a million times more likely to pick up a scent, while a hedgehog is ten thousand times better equipped for finding food. However, even with olfactory centres that occupy just one thousandth of our cranial capacity, we humans are still pretty good at detecting, recognising and remembering odours.
We can diagnose disease, detect danger and distinguish between good and bad food just with our nose. We can recognise our relatives, pick out a garment worn by someone who shares our genes and determine the sex of strangers, all by just a little sniff. We can do these things mostly without thinking and smell is located in the lower part of the brain that is governed more by animal instinct than intellect. Smell is an emotional sense. An old one, more closely connected to hunger, thirst and sexual arousal than to the thinking part of the mind. Perhaps this is why it is so difficult to describe and maybe why we are more ambivalent towards it than other senses.
I certainly missed mine when it was gone but luckily I have the tools to do something about it. Amongst the 361 classical acupuncture points on the body there are two that sit either side of the nostrils known as ‘Welcome Fragrance’ or Large Intestine 21 for the more numerically minded.
These points are said to open the nasal passages and are classically indicated for nasal congestion, nasal discharge, nasal polyps, nasal sores, nasal bleeding and most importantly for me, loss of sense of smell. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever had to insert a needle half an inch in to your own nasal-labial groove but I can tell you it certainly makes your eyes water. Once it’s in however, it’s not an unpleasant experience and I added a needle further down the large intestine channel to help with the free flowing of Qi. I also added another needle on the Heart channel which has the action of opening up the pores, just in case I had any more sweat that needed to come out.
I stayed like this for half an hour or so and then took them out and carried on mooching about the house. A couple of hours later when my kids came back from school I had a sensation that I can only describe as miraculous. It was as if the Lord God himself had come down from the heavens and smited all evil from my body. My brain was alive with its full array of senses once more, exploding in to a vibrant and colourful cacophony. I have never been so ecstatic to smell a burnt crumpet in all my life!
It took a few more days to come back to normal but I have heard of people still not getting their sense of smell back many months after contracting covid. This is a real shame and needn’t be this way. If you do suffer from anosmia then I highly recommend that you go to an acupuncturist (it’s probably best that you don’t try it yourself!) and ask for your ‘Welcome Fragrance’ to be needled. It really does do what it says on the tin.
Matt Fellows
www.glastonburyacupuncture.co.uk/articles