The Road to Recovery

I was interviewed last week by Robert Camuto, an editor at Wine Spectator who lost his sense of smell after a recent bout with COVID-19. I suggested that he try smell training to assist his recovery of function. You can read about his experience here in his new column.

A Note on Free Speech and Social Media

 

In addition to returning to FirstNerve, I’ve been re-evaluating my participation in social media. I’m a big believer in free speech and in freedom from being tracked and monetized by tech monopolies and their billionaire owners. So I’ve made a few changes in my life.

First off, I shut down my @scienceofscent and @scentofweed Twitter accounts. I will not be part of a platform where Jack Dorsey and his minions can arbitrarily shut down people, organizations, and viewpoints that they dislike. 

My disenchantment with Twitter had been growing for years. That’s why in August 2016 joined GAB as @Avery. Although I found a few people to follow, it wasn’t easy to get much traction there in the early days. Few of the big-name bloggers and pundits had joined, and those who had didn’t post much. This has changed dramatically in the past few months. There is a steady stream of big-name refugees from twitter and a ton of new subscribers. GAB has increased its server capacity big time and the user experience and speed are now excellent. I encourage you to join. 

Of course, I also had an account at Parler before it was thrown off the internet by Amazon Web Services. (“If you don’t like Twitter, go make your own version.” OK, they did. “If we won’t host you on our servers, go make your own.” OK, they’re trying to do that.) 

What about the journalists, pundits, and commentators I used to follow on Twitter? Simple: I subscribe to their email notifications directly or I sign up to follow them on Substack. Substack is an interesting model—it’s a free blogging platform that also allows you to monetize some or all of your content. In other words, you can offer some content for free and reserve other content for subscribers who pay a monthly subscription to get it. This might be a way to restore the independent blogging voices that were so great in the early years of this century. Stay tuned. 

I’ve also grown weary of Google. (Yes, I know it owns Blogger and therefore enables FirstNerve.) Over the past year or so the results returned by its search engine have become . . . less useful. The first page or two of results are from a limited group of news providers and websites. Image searches are biased to stock photo companies. (Do they pay for placement?) This is not the freewheeling Google search of old—it feels rigged. Plus, Google tracks and monetizes the search histories of everyone who uses the service. Who wants that? My solution is to use DuckDuckGo for searches: it works well and it doesn’t track you.  

Then there’s the matter of Gmail. I’ve had a “throw away” account there for years. That means Google bots finger through my correspondence looking for trends the company can monetize (never mind sorting my mail into categories whether I want it to or not). When the auto dealership reminds me it’s time for an oil change, Google knows my identity, the dealer’s identity, and the make and model of my car. The hell with that. I’ve now switched all those threads to my privately hosted email. 

Google also owns YouTube where it has been behaving badly—demonetizing and banning people, organizations, and views that it would rather not hear from. The good news is that there is now an alternative: Rumble.com. It is clean, easy to use, and easy to monetize (if that’s your thing). I’m signed up as AveryGilbert, and am already seeing the service being populated by journalists and videographers with large following. Have a look and join in! 

Then there’s the other distasteful Silicon Valley tech oligarchy—Apple. The Messages on my iPhone are encrypted only went sent to other iPhone users; those exchanged with non-iPhones (the texts in the green bubbles) are not. So for peace of mind I’ve signed up with Signal, a service that provides end-to-end encryption of all your texts, voice calls, and video chats. It’s super-intuitive and fast. What’s not to like? Go get it. 

Bottom line: I sense a coming re-alignment in social media. The dominance of today’s tech oligarchy is beginning to slip. They could become tomorrow’s dinosaurs. It’s happened before (MySpace, anyone?). And high-tech is all about being “disruptive”, is it not?

Goodbye to All That

Well . . . I’m back.

Yesterday I ended my eight-year dalliance with Twitter @scienceofscent. The precipitating reason was Twitter’s political censorship: it had reached such an intolerable level I could no longer associate myself with it.

I rarely posted about partisan politics. I figured my 1,440 followers wanted my take on sensory issues in science and culture, not my political views. The closest I came to expressing them was in posts about free speech and academic/scientific/commercial integrity. Spoiler alert: I believe in free speech and scientific integrity.

Few of the scientists I followed share my scruples. They salt their threads with political tweets and casually assume everyone agrees with their POV. (They are academics, so when on campus they assume correctly.) Especially grating are the Europeans who freely opine on American politics and society; personally, I wouldn’t presume to lecture Brits on Brexit, or Germans on the EU.

Another reason for leaving is that Twitter is now less engaging. There’s a big, interesting world out there and just not enough time to read the daily stream of humble brags (“so proud of my team’s newly published paper”) or flame wars on the biological basis of consciousness fought in 280-character salvos. The guarded, deliberately evasive language of some tweets isn’t worth the time it takes to puzzle them out. Finally, it’s my impression that comments in replies and retweets—the “social” part of social media—have become less frequent and less interesting.

To be fair, commenting on FirstNerve (and blogs in general) had declined as well, as people were drawn to the rapid fire adrenaline hits of likes and retweets. But I’m back here now hoping to rekindle the discussion by providing longer form coverage of all matters sensory.

I welcome your comments. You can sign up (on the right) to receive email notification of my new posts.

The SMELL CHANGE STATUS CHECK -- A Quick Way to Assess Recent Smell Loss in Suspected COVID-19

There have been numerous anecdotal reports of smell loss in people with COVID-19. It’s not surprising to find transient or even permanent smell loss associated with upper respiratory tract infections—in fact, it’s one of the leading causes of smell loss. However, in cases of flu, head cold, and sinus infection, the smell loss usually occurs at the same time, or following, the emergence of symptoms. What’s interesting here is the suggestion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may trigger smell loss before full-blown COVID-19 disease is apparent. Thus, it might be evident in otherwise symptom-free people. If so, smell loss could be a useful marker in deciding whether to test someone for the virus, allow them back to work, etc.

Most people in the medical and chemosensory communities are aware of these possibilities. What has been unaddressed, thus far, is how exactly front-line medical personnel should probe for recent smell changes in potential patients.

Commercially available smell tests, such as the UPSIT and Sniffin’ Stick kits, are designed for full evaluation of smell function (although there are brief versions of each). However, they are relatively time-consuming to administer, at least in the context of evaluating people in the middle of a viral pandemic. They also require close patient contact with the test materials, which raises concerns about virus transfer and hazardous waste disposal.

My old friend and colleague Mark Greenberg, a neuropsychologist with a clinical practice in Boston, were talking about this earlier in the week and decided what was needed was a brief, verbal assessment using standardized questions, to determine if a person has experienced a recent change in smell function. We came up with three questions modified from the NHANES health survey, and added another of our own.

We call the resulting 4-item screener the SMELL CHANGE STATUS CHECK, or SCSC. We’ve made it available via a Creative Commons license. You can download it at this link. We hope healthcare professionals will find it useful. It may help in compiling data regarding how often smell loss is associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, and when it emerges during the typical clinical course.

Annals of Hype: Yet Another Health Claim for CBD

The alarm on the FirstNerve Bogosity Meter™ has been blaring nonstop since New Year’s Day. It hasn’t recorded base levels this high since the Dot Com bubble at the turn of the century. Most of the triggering events are coming from the cannabis sector, and have to do with health claims for cannabis and its constituent cannabinoids and terpenes.

This morning’s alarm was set off by a tweet from a weed website called The Fresh Toast:

Research suggests CBD could help manage varicose veins via influence on the cardiovascular system. https://t.co/1READQDCgd

— The Fresh Toast (@getfreshtoast) January 27, 2020

“Research suggests CBD could help manage varicose veins via influence on the cardiovascular system.”

Well, that sounds interesting. I wonder who did the research? After all, it’s notoriously difficult to use federal grant money to research weed or any of its components, especially using human subjects. (For the uninitiated, CBD is cannabidiol, a cannabinoid that occurs in marijuana and hemp. It has little or none of the psychoactive kick of its chemical relative THC, although it may interact with the human body’s endogenous cannabinoid receptors.)

The tweet links this article posted on The Fresh Toast, a website that bills itself as “the most trusted name in cannabis.” It was written by one Kate-Madonna Hindes. Her post is slugged “Here’s what we know about CBD’s effects on varicose veins.” Hindes sets things up with some general info about varicose veins before revealing her big piece of evidence:

A study published by the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology in 2013 showed promise for cannabidiol as therapy for the cardiovascular system. The study gave insight into CBD’s benefits and offered that in some cases, cannabidiol could cause a reduction in vascular tension or, “vasorelaxation.”

So the hook behind the tweet and post was not a new finding but a seven-year-old paper. Further, it was not a clinical study or even an experimental report; in fact, it contained no new data at all. It was a review paper that examined previously published work relevant to the question “Is the cardiovascular system a therapeutic target for cannabidiol?”

Well, nuts. But the review might still discuss research on CBD and varicose veins, right? Wrong. Varicose veins are not mentioned in the review. The cardiovascular disorders is does consider are diabetes, myocardial infarction, stress, stroke, and encephalitis. And the CBD-relevant evidence on these conditions is drawn from studies on dissociated human cells, rats, mice, and Mongolian gerbils.

In summarizing these studies, the authors of the review paper conclude:

Together, these data suggest that the cardiovascular system is indeed a valid therapeutic target for CBD. However, the target sites of action for CBD remain to be established for most of these responses. Whether these responses to CBD will translate into the human cardiovascular system also remains to be established.

In other words, they are very cautious and make no claim for CBD as a potential treatment for any human vascular disorder whatsoever.

But what does Kate-Madonna Hindes conclude?

With the introduction of CBD into the market, professionals and patients are taking notice of CBD’s benefits for varicose veins, but does research support its use?

The short answer is: Maybe.

I’d say the short answer is: No.

Hindes does her readers no favor by giving them the impression that there is any evidence at all for CBD as a treatment for varicose veins. She merely adds to the tsunami of online stories that tout CBD’s potential as a treatment for everything that ails you.

No wonder the Bogosity Meter is working overtime.