A student shared a life hack on how to restore a sense of taste and smell after COVID-19: even doctors use it

Kemar Gary Lalor, 23, an architecture student from Toronto, Canada, shared his mom's recipe that helped him regain his sense of taste and smell after COVID-19. Lalore's mom, Trudi-Ann Lalor, contracted COVID-19 and lost her sense of taste and smell. Lalor himself also felt bad, lost his sense of smell and taste, but he was not examined for COVID. How he managed to quickly restore lost feelings, told the publication Buzz Feed News.

His mom said she got her sense of smell and taste back within a few days, so he asked how she did it.

“She showed me the medicine her mother gave her as a child in Jamaica,” he said.

His mom's recipe involves cooking an orange over an open fire until the fruit is completely black on the outside. After removing the burnt orange peel, mix the toasted orange with brown sugar in a cup or bowl, about two tablespoons of sugar per orange. Then eat it.

Lalor tried it and it worked. Then, a few days later, the recipe worked for his little sister as well. The guy realized that it would be useful to let more people know about this.

He created a video on TikTok explaining how to prepare a "healing" dish.

People immediately started trying the recipe. Lalor received a lot of feedback: some saw the results right away, some managed to regain their lost sense of smell and taste after trying again or adjusting the recipe.

“My mom and I were happy to help everyone during this difficult time,” Lalor said.

Philippa-Grace Ako, a BuzzFeed employee, recently contracted COVID-19 and tried the recipe herself. While it didn't work for her, it did work for her boyfriend.

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Soon, other people on TikTok began to test the method, even doctors. Karan Rajan, a surgeon at the UK's National Health Service, posted a video on TikTok of him sampling the recipe himself. He suggested that a cooked orange could work as physical therapy for the senses; he called it "olfactory training."

“The olfactory nerve has fibers in the brain and nose that affect the ability to smell and taste,” he said.

Rajan explained that olfactory training is a technique that has been used in medicine to try to restore functions impaired by diseases that cause symptoms similar to those of COVID-19. The theory is that it helps to retrain the nerves, as happens during rehabilitation if someone is injured in a limb.

“A similar concept applies to olfactory learning - however, instead of physical rehabilitation, this would involve trying to stimulate the olfactory system through exposure to strong odors,” he said.

He said olfactory training doesn't always work.

“There is nothing universal in medicine,” Rajan said. "We all have very different internal physiology."

James Palmer, professor and director of the department of rhinology, said he was a little skeptical about the method, noting that there is still debate about whether this olfactory training or olfactory training actually works. Despite a number of studies, Palmer said there is little hard data on this.

Plus, he said, traditional olfactory training usually doesn't work the way it was shown in the TikTok video. He said that this usually involves putting different scents in jars and sniffing them "several times every day."

Palmer believes that the improvement after the procedure described in the video could just be a lucky coincidence. However, according to him, you will not lose anything by trying Lalor's method, just be prepared for the fact that it may not work.