22 Dec Medscape: What Our Sense of Smell Can Reveal About Our Health
These are heady times for otolaryngologists, those who study and treat disorders of the nose. It was not always so. Darwin regarded smell as a rudimentary sense because its use in hunting, detecting danger, and other primal activities is now far less critical. And in a 2019 U.K. survey, 250 adults effectively turned up their noses at smell, ranking it the least valued of our five senses.
But smell remains crucial to our well-being. We’re learning more and more that our sense of smell is closely linked to our health — and could one day be used for monitoring our health and predicting disease.
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