Treatment
Due to the rareness of the disorder, there is no well-defined treatment yet. Sometimes the patients are just told to live with the disorder or the patients end up performing "stereotypical methods" that might help in reducing the severity of the odor. This might include forced crying, bending over holding knees while holding breath, rinsing the nose with saline water and gagging. All these behaviours at the end fail to resolve the hallucination. Various treatments like prophylactic have been suggested but more research is needed for its confirmation. Also, due to being a poorly understood disorder, and having analogies to some psychiatric conditions, some patients are told that they have a mental illness. It is also usual for these patients to have suicidal thoughts as they are not provided with much support or hope from many physicians.
One of the Surgical treatments proposed has included olfactory bulb ablation through a bifrontal craniotomy approach. But a counter-argument by Leopold, Loehrl and Schwob (2002) has stated that this ablation process results in a bilateral permanent anosmia and includes risks associated with a craniotomy. According to them, the use of transnasal endoscopic exhition of olfactory epithelium is a safe and effective treatment for patients with unremitting Phantosmia with the olfactory function being potentially spared. It is also cautioned that the surgery is challenging one and is associated with major risks, and that it should be restricted to expertise centres.
On the other hand, many cases have also reported that the strength of their symptoms have decreased with time. (Duncan and Seidan, 1995) A case involving long term phantosmia has been treated with the use of an anti depressive medication by the common name Venlafaxine. The brand name of the drug is Effexor. The relation between mood disorders and phantosmia is unknown, and is a widely researched area. In many cases, the symptoms of phantosmia have been reduced by the use of anti seizure and anti depressants that act on the central and peripheral neurons.
The most commonly used treatment method is the removal of the olfactory epithelium or the bulb by means of surgery to alleviate the patient from the symptoms. Other traditional methods include the use of topical anesthetics (Zilstorff-Pederson, 1995) and use of sedatives
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