The smell of fresh air. When is the last time you can say you stopped to really enjoy the fresh air or the smell outside when it is about to rain? Especially in St. Louis where seasonal allergies run rampant, we all take simple things each day for granted. For Christine Barrett she can confidently say it had been over 9 years since she could smell anything at all. “Chris” as we lovingly call her came to our clinic initially for back pain. She had been a previous patient of our Physical Therapist Sandy Miller since 2010, and she was anxious to see what her trusted therapist was up to these days.
When Chris came in she had low back pain which she rated a 9/10 on the pain scale. She could barely stand up straight. She saw great improvement in her back pain in her first week of decompression, physical therapy and chiropractic care, and the pain continued to diminish as the weeks passed. She got to feeling so good she would bake all of us dessert treats and bring them in, always saying, “Well, I can only hope it tastes okay, because I can’t taste or smell it.” She brought joy to us and herself as we exclaimed how delicious her food was. One day we got to thinking and asked Chris how she lost her smell and taste. Had she always been missing these senses? She and her doctors are unsure why or how, but they guess it was due to a virus she caught years ago.She woke up one day and could no longer smell anything and could only taste general bitterness or sweetness but no distinct flavors.
The clinicians at the Ozzie Smith Center decided to give regenerative medicine a try. After her first PRP injection in her back, she received a small amount of PRP to take home with her in a nasal spray bottle. She used the PRP twice daily, inhaling it for three days. Only one week later, Chris was walking down the aisle at the grocery store and suddenly smelled laundry detergent! She can now enjoy the fresh air at her farm, pictured here, and she could even tell how smelly her young nephew was after playing outside all of Labor Day weekend. Her sense of taste is returning slowly each day as flavors develop. If you’ve got something in your life you are missing out on, give us a call and see if we can help with our integrated model and the amazing advances of regenerative medicine.
“I feel really blessed to be here. This place is amazing. I never thought I would smell or taste again. I tell (and smell) everybody.”
-Christine Barrett
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