Welcome to Olfaction Action™

Welcome to the Olfaction Action™ community!

Olfaction Action™ is the only website dedicated to understanding and coping with the loss of taste and smell, and provides information about why our senses disappear, and resources for potentially improving them.

I created this site a few months after I, myself, had gradually (and then suddenly) lost my senses of taste and smell. The slide show pictures on the Home page are examples of things I can no longer smell.

I finally realized they were gone at Thanksgiving, 2023, because after making a batch of that traditional Thanksgiving dish chhole (chickpea curry, ingredients here (affiliate link)) for a pitch in Thanksgiving dinner party, I realized I could not for the life of me taste or smell the spices in the dish.

Nope - I couldn’t taste or smell the garlic, ginger, coriander, cumin, turmeric, cilantro or garam masala (affiliate link)! The only thing I could kind of taste was the serrano pepper, which my doctor explained to me actually is sensed by pain receptors on the tongue, not taste buds.

I found my loss of taste and smell to be very disconcerting, because, well, most people would, and I especially was hit hard by the loss because I had only months before started collecting recipes in earnest and cooking more than I had in past years. So my blossoming culinary effort came to a rather screeching halt.

I am hoping that my loss of taste and smell is not permanent, and I know I’m not alone on this journey. Millions of people (1 in 4) experience the loss of taste and/or smell at some point in their life, whether due to a medical condition, age, or other causes.

As such, I am building a community of fellow travelers who can navigate their journey with a group of people who really do understand what they’re going through.

This site contains information that I hope will help people understand that the loss they are experiencing is not uncommon. I will also try and provide information from the medical literature that may be helpful to my readers.

I did what I recommend everyone experiencing loss of smell do. About four months into my loss of smell, I went to an ear, nose and throat (ENT) doctor, and he evaluated me for any physical abnormalities in the nose. A nasal endoscopic exam revealed something indeterminate, so I went for a facial CT scan, which was fine. The doctor then sent me to have a brain MRI to look in particular at the olfactory nerve, and the MRI result was fine.

(By the way, as many people know, and MRI machine is noisy, but they gave me sound reducing headphones to wear through which music play from my favorite Sirius XM channel. The MRI tech told me the scan would take about 30 minutes. With the music, So the scan procedure was tolerable. I counted the songs, which typically are about 3-1/2 minutes long, as they went by, and by song 9, we were done.)

Returning to topic - as I will explain in subsequent posts, I am engaged in a smell retraining effort that I hope will improve my sense of smell.

I invite you to come with me and learn more about the causes of the loss of taste and smell, and to sign up below to receive future blog posts.

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As explained in our Policies and Terms, links to products are for informational/educational purposes only, and are not a substitute for professional medical advice. Olfaction Action™ makes no representation or warranty about the accuracy, safety or usefulness of those products.