Could electr shock bring your of sm
Approximately 1.3 million of those who have developed long Covid in the UK reported their ability to smell anything was impacted. Now some sufferers are turning to microcurrent therapy to solve the problem. Claire Coleman investigates
Smelling your rubbish bin might of her bin bag after she took the rubbish out on Christmas Day was the best present she could have asked for.
“Being able to smell bad things again – and differentiate between them – is so amazing, I can’t even tell you,” says Liz, 49.not be an obvious thing to celebrate. But for Liz Stout, being able to smell the contents “Before, all ‘bad’ smells smelled the same, a sort of hideous sulphuric, burnt smell, whether it was the bins, the dog or a public loo.”
Liz, 49, co-founder of luxury dog grooming brand Foxy Margot ( foxymargot.com) caught Covid in December 2020. At the time, she felt she’d got off lightly.
“I wasn’t remotely ill. No temperature, no fatigue, no breathing issues, no time in bed. I simply lost my sense of taste and smell,” she says. “My taste came back quite quickly but my sense of smell just never got back to normal. Not only did all bad smells smell the same, most of the time I felt like I either had cotton wool up my nose, or a sort of mouldy filter across everything I smelled.”
A year on, Liz puts her recovery down to a medical device traditionally used to help sports injuries and joint conditions, which zaps you with tiny electrical currents.
“I’d tried smell training with oranges and essential oils to no avail and I was trying to get a GP referral to the UCLH smell clinic where they use vitamin A and steroids to help you smell properly again, when someone suggested I tried microcurrent,” she says.
An estimated two million people in the UK have, or have had, long Covid, where symptoms persist for more than 12 weeks after the initial infection. And an altered, or lack of, sense of smell, known as parosmia or anosmia, affects roughly two in three people suffering from long Covid. It might sound like a minor issue, but studies show more than half of patients with this kind of disturbance report a significant and severe decrease in their quality of life.
“You don’t realise how important your sense of smell is until you lose it,”
says Liz, who lives in Buckinghamshire with her two teenage children.
"If I stuck my nose deep in a coffee cup of e, or sprayed perfume on a handkerchief and inhaled deeply, I could get something. But I couldn’t smell the bakery at the supermarket, or my kids. It sounds silly, but it was y depressing.
"You lose a barometer of measurement. I know I don’t have BO, but I worried that if I did, I wouldn’t have known. More seriously, I feared my house could burn down without me realising.”
Losing her sense of smell also affected her work.
“We’d had samples made up for a dog shampoo and I thought they all smelled terrible,” Liz recalls. “They didn’t, it was just me, but I had to let my business partner decide.” However, six weeks after first starting to use microcurrent therapy, ays she feels “like I’ve brushed the webs off my nose”. "It's not 100 per cent back, but I can l my children when I sniff their heads, I can distinguish between bad smells, I don’t get waves of overpowering sulphur and I can smell the sort of background smells, like fresh laundry, that you take for granted. After a year, it’s too much of a coincidence for me not to put it down to the device.” So what is this miraculous gadget? Rechargeable, about the size of a small MP3 player, and worn in a band on the arm, leg or ankle, for three hours a day, Arc4Health uses technology originally devised to help rehabilitate injured horses.
“Your body runs on electrical impulses,” explains
Peter Clayton, CEO of the company that makes the device. “To move your hand requires a signal from your brain and that signal is called a biocurrent.”
These electrical impulses aren’t at a strength that we can feel – they are millionths of an amp. Smaller even than the charge put out by TENS machines or electrical toning machines that use thousandths of an amp, and many, many times smaller than the 13 amp sockets we have in our homes.
Research has shown that introducing an external microcurrent to the body can help to reduce inflammation and increase the rate of repair, which is why everyone from athletes recovering from injury to arthritis sufferers use it for pain relief and recovery. But studies, including work carried out at the University of Glasgow, now suggest long Covid is, like arthritis, a chronic inflammatory condition, which is why microcurrent therapy might help.
“Microcurrent doesn’t carry out the repair process itself,” explains Peter. “What it does is help to increase the production of a substance called ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which provides the body’s cells with energy. The more ATP, the more efficiently the cells can pass nutrients around the body, and the quicker the body can repair itself. Everyone’s personal microcurrent is different, but in the space of three hours, the device can deliver 4.2 million permutations of microcurrents, which means one of them will match yours.”
He points out that the therapy is systemic so you can’t aim it at any one point in the body – just like when you eat protein, you can’t tell the body to use it to build muscle or repair a ligament. It is why a daily treatment for six weeks is recommended. It also means that while you might want to try it to tackle long Covid symptoms, you might find other issues resolving first.
“In the first couple of weeks, I noticed a real boost in my energy levels,” says Liz. “And other little ailments, like my knees, which felt really creaky and the arthritic pain I get in my thumb went away. But three weeks in, I realised I wasn’t noticing the same extreme bad smells I had before. Also, after four weeks I had a haircut and realised I could smell the scented candle the salon was burning.”
Liz plans to continue with the device with the hope of her smell going back to normal entirely.
“We don’t market the device as a treatment for long Covid, but we’ve had a lot of testimonials from people who think it has
helped with their symptoms,” says Peter. And the theory has convinced independent experts too.
Dr Charles Hoyle is a researcher with the Cochrane group, which helps provide evidence-based healthcare information. His previous work has assessed trials that use microcurrent to treat pain, especially in chronic inflammatory conditions.
“Microcurrent technology is not a new thing,” he says. “Studies on the benefits of this type of therapy on inflammation and pain have been around for decades. And although Covid-19 is a virus our bodies have not encountered before, the inflammatory response is the same as it would be with any other condition that caused chronic inflammation. So it comes as no surprise that this approach is an entirely viable treatment strategy to target side-effects of long Covid.”
The Arc4Health device costs £199 from arc4health.
I couldn’t smell the bakery or even my kids and it was depressing