Losing your sense of smell

 As everybody knows by now, losing your sense of smell is one of the first symptoms of Covid-19. Some survivors have yet to regain that sense. I didn’t realize how devastating the loss of smell could be until I read an article about it in The New York Times. As one scientist said, “You think of it as an aesthetic bonus sense. But when someone is denied their sense of smell, it changes the way they perceive the environment and their place in the environment. People’s sense of well-being declines. It can be really jarring and disconcerting.” Many sufferers lose their ability to feel pleasure and develop a strange sense of detachment and isolation. What’s more, when you lose your sense of smell, you lose much of your sense of taste. All you can taste is salty, sour, sweet, bitter and umami (savory/brothy/meaty).

Here is what some of the sufferers have said:

“I feel alien from myself. It’s also kind of a loneliness in the world. Like part of me is missing, as I can no longer smell and experience the emotions of everyday basic living.”

“I feel discombobulated—like I don’t exist. I can’t smell my house and feel at home. I can’t smell fresh air or grass when I go out. I can’t smell the rain.”

“I call it the Covid diet. There’s no point in indulging in brownies if I can’t really taste the brownie. For a few months, every day almost, I would cry at the end of the day.”

I, for one, haven’t appreciated how important my sense of smell is to my sense of well-being. Now I do. 

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Exercises to improve balance

 I rarely read Jane Brody’s “Personal Health” columns in The New York Times because she annoys me. But I must give her credit for alerting me to a little book about balance: Falling is Not an Option: A Way to Lifelong Balance by George Locker. His thesis is that our ability to balance comes from muscle knowledge—that is, muscles automatically knowing what to do. The muscles he talks about are postural muscles—those muscles that engage spontaneously to keep our bodies erect against gravity’s downward pull. If we don’t use those muscles enough, they muscles “forget” how to maintain balance. You can’t always rely on your skeleton to hold you up. If your skeleton starts to tip, you want your muscles to set you to rights.

His solution to this problem is to perform exercises that activate and use the postural muscles—those weight-bearing muscles that are engaged when our knees and ankles are bent (picture skiers, surfers, skateboarders). In such postures, your body is weighted and your muscles become engaged, especially your thigh (quadriceps) and butt (glute) muscles.

I was going to include images of one of his exercises but was not successful at copying them from his book (I have the digital version). I guess you’ll just have to buy his book—or take up surfing, skiing, or skateboarding.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

 

Salivary glands, spit, and dry mouth

 Scientists have recently discovered a new set of salivary glands. Until now, everyone thought we had three sets of large ones: one near the ears, another below the jaw, and another under the tongue. (There are also a bunch of small ones in your mouth.) The newly-discovered fourth pair sits where the nasal cavity meets the throat, draped over the tubes that connect the ears to the throat.

A typical adult secretes a little less than a quart and a half of saliva a day. Saliva is almost entirely water, but a tiny portion is full of useful enzymes that speed up chemical reactions in your mouth, such as breaking down sugars in carbohydrates. Other enzymes attack pathogens.

At the moment, the new discovery is of most importance to oncologists who use radiation therapy for patients with cancer of the head or neck. Because doctors didn’t know the glands existed, nobody tried to spare them from such treatments. Patients often end up with chronic dry mouth and swallowing problems. Besides radiation treatments, hundreds of medications produce dry mouth, including those used to treat depression, high blood pressure and anxiety, as well as some antihistamines, decongestants, muscle relaxants, and pain medications.

I know from experience that fear also makes your mouth dry. This happened to me when it was my turn to give my first speech at Toastmasters. Fear engenders a fight or flight response, slowing down all the body processes that aren’t necessary for your immediate survival, including your digestive system of which salivary glands are a part. Considering that many people fear speaking in public more than they fear death, the fight or flight response isn’t surprising. For my part, I think dying is worse than speaking in public.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Stop weight-shaming children

 As much as I admire Michelle Obama, I was never in favor of her Let’s Move campaign to fight obesity in children. And it’s not because the program didn’t do much good (childhood obesity rate jumped from 27.5 percent in 1999 to 33.2 percent in 2014). My objection to the program has to do with shaming children.

The experience of shaming was recounted by an op-ed writer in The New York Times, who, as a child, learned from her doctor that her “body was wrong.” “I’d failed a test I didn’t even know I’d taken, and the sense of failure and self-loathing it inspired planted the seeds of a depression I would live with for many years.” Her life, she says, was “filled with self-flagellation, forced performances to display my commitment to changing an unacceptable body.” Despite her best efforts, thinness never came.

“Even at such a young age I had been declared an enemy combatant in the nation’s war on childhood obesity, and I felt that fact deeply. Bodies like mine represented an epidemic, and we were its virus, personified.” She sees the war on childhood obesity as pursuing one question: how do we make fat kids thin? “In other words, how do we get rid of fat kids?…Weight stigma kick-starts what for many will become lifelong cycles of shame. And it sends a clear, heartbreaking message to fat children: The world would be a better place without you in it.”

Well, that’s pretty sad. As the headline of this piece says, “Leave Overweight Kids Alone.”

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Your immune system

 It’s enormously complicated and also unique to you. Immune cells are generated from lymph nodes, bone marrow, the spleen, the thymus and more. You have, at the least, three hundred different types of immune cells at work (e.g., lymphocytes, T-cells, antibodies). The system must respond to toxins, drugs, cancers, foreign objects, and even your state of mind (if stressed, you are much more likely to suffer an infection). No wonder the system sometimes makes mistakes and attacks innocent cells, giving us autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and Crohn’s disease.

We have two kinds of immunity: Innate immunity, which kicks off the immune response, stimulating our bodies to combat invaders and build defenses; Adaptive immunity, which creates pathogen-specific antibodies and memory T-cells, making it possible for our bodies to quickly respond if the same invader strikes again.

As we age our immune systems stiffen up, becoming slower to turn on and off. For one thing, the system becomes chronically active as though our bodies were constantly responding to attack. As the years go by, our level of inflammation rises. It’s partly the result of cellular senescence, in which cells stop replicating and trigger an immune response. What’s more, our thymus glands atrophy, which reduces their production of killer T-cells that fight infection (T for thymus). To make matters worse, around twenty percent of our T-cell repertoire is devoted to fighting a single virus: human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a strain of herpes that usually has no symptoms and does nothing but consume T-cell resources. Great. Maybe that's why some days everything seems to hurt.

By the way, even though I'm mostly anti-medical intervention, I plan to get the coronavirus vaccination. I'm not irrational.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.