The short answer to this question, when I first posed it back in November, was a cautious yes. I’d been anosmic – no sense of smell – for several years. A visit to my local sawbones had proved futile, yielding only a steroid nasal spray that made me ill. So I tried acupuncture and after about six weeks, my sense of smell came back! Hooray!
I enjoyed about three weeks of smelling the world again – and the world smelled good – even when it smelled bad. So I rushed to press and blogged about how successful I’d been and wasn’t this acupuncture business amazing.
I spoke too soon, because it disappeared again, even though I was continuing with the acupuncture. Twelve weeks later, it had shown no signs of re-recovery and the acupuncturist finally sacked me as a hopeless case. I was very disappointed – not just to be left anosmic, but because having those pins stuck in me had become the highpoint of my week. Sounds strange I know, but you need to try it.
Anyway, the longer answer, right now, appears to be: maybe acupuncture doesn’t work for anosmia, or at least not in my case, or rather not in any meaningful, long term sense.
Reluctantly, I returned to the sawbones with my tail between my legs. He wasn’t impressed by my acupuncture story.
“But it came back,” I assured him. “It definitely came back.”
He admitted it was curious, but still told me off for not having gone to see him sooner and for wasting time on new age nonsense. No surprises there, I suppose. Then he sent me away with a prescription for some powerful antibiotics.
A few weeks later, I was still anosmic. I also had a bad stomach and had contracted the worst chest infection I’ve ever had in my life – because antibiotics are a bit of a blunderbluss, swatting dead any harmful bacteria, but blowing a hole in your immune system while they’re at it, leaving you wide open to anything else that’s going.
So I waited for all of that to clear up, then went back to the sawbones. This time he said my septum was very narrow.
“What? Oh, sure, I know, but it’s always been like that doc, and I can breathe through it very well – breathe through it all the time because I meditate and do Qigong and stuff – and I used to be able to smell very well through it, and if you remember last November I told you when I was having acupuncture,…. my nose was obviously working, narrow septum or not so,….oh,… never mind.”
He was looking a bit blank by now, like I was speaking Esperanto, so I shut up and let him grumble some more about my suspiciously narrow septum.
Now I’m off to see the Ear Nose and Throat specialist at my local hospital. The sawbones is favouring surgery for that deviant septum. He tells me the surgery’s nothing to worry about. I tell him I’m not worried at all because no matter what the outcome of the ENT diagnosis, nobody’s going to be sticking a scalpel up my nose. It may be useless for smelling the coffee but it works very well in other respects, and I’m for leaving it well alone thanks very much.
So I was feeling a bit glum about the whole business, but the very next day I experienced a minor epiphany. I was in the works canteen when I found myself staring in disbelief at the guy next to me.
“You all right, Mike?” he asked, a little worried.
“Em,… yes. You’re having fish and chips?”
He looked down at his tray in order to confirm the obvious. “Yes.”
I couldn’t believe it. They smelled great! So did the coffee I had with my lunch. So did the canteen, which was suddenly filled with the rich fatty smell of cooking odours.
I walked away puzzled. It’s November since I last smelled anything.
When I got home, I flipped the lid off the coffee jar, stuck my nose in deep and took a long luxurious draw on the contents,…. nothing.
My nose, it seems, has a quirky sense of humour.
Graeme out.
The Rivendale Review 
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