|
I have a 45-minute drive from my home in Lake Forest to work in Pomona, and it’s a beautiful drive through rolling hills and winding roads. On a slight variation from my usual habit, I had the car windows open. It was a lovely 74 degrees with the sun rising to my right. The hills were still lightly shrouded in mist and low sunrise light at about 6:30 AM.
At one point, I passed through a semirural area, and all of a sudden I was hit with the smell of horse manure. Now, for those of you who have never been around horses, this mildly pungent odor is not foul, and this smell brought to me a sense memory. When I was a child in Long Island, New York, my parents owned some  horses and stabled them at a nearby horse ranch. I was pretty small at the time and I recall the sites and smells of the ranch, particularly that of the horses themselves. My father had bought a Thoroughbred that had spent some time as a racehorse, and this giant animal scared the daylights out of me. He was muscled like a bodybuilder and virtually rippled with power. I was a very small child and my father, a tall large man himself, was a good match for this horse. A few times, my father would sit me astride the horse with him sitting behind me, and it was pure exhilaration. It seemed like the horse could go from standing to a flat out gallop instantaneously. During these visits to the horse farm, my father also showed me how to take care of the horses, cleaning out their hooves and rubbing them down. It’s a nice memory.
And it was all sparked by that perhaps one second smell. Clearly, our sense of smell is a powerful thing. This kind of recall happens for me reasonably frequently, perhaps a few times per month and for whatever odd reason, they’re usually pleasant memories.
This whole thing has me thinking about the smells associated with the hospital and their effects on patient experiences. For someone who spends a lot of time in a hospital, one may become somewhat inured to the smells. Think of the common hospital smells – antiseptic, urine, feces, and occasionally blood – and it’s easy to understand how odors might contribute to negative patient experiences. Why don’t we spend any time making our hospitals smell more pleasant?
If you think about it for a minute, you’ll start to wonder why also. Consider for a moment the complex interaction of smell and the human brain. Our olfactory system is directly linked with the very complex limbic system, which, among other things, plays a part in long-term memory, motivation, behavior and emotion. Given this interaction, it’s no wonder that various odors would trigger memories and emotions.
The research in this field is understandably brisk (just imagine how much this matters to the perfume industry). Alaoui-Ismaili and colleagues, for example, looked at the connection between odor and the autonomic nervous system (ANS). They exposed patients to five different odorants and recorded 11 different measures of the ANS (such as skin temperature, for example). They additionally had patients verbally describe their emotions in response to the odors. Vanillin and menthol, two of the odors, were found to correspond well with patients’ verbal descriptions (happiness and surprise in the case of these odors) and the unconscious CNS manifestations. Similar findings were noted for other odors and more negative emotions.1
Clearly, this is a highly complex interaction we have with this aspect of our environment, but it makes sense. We would be evolutionarily adapted to respond positively to certain smells and negatively to others. The pleasant odor of certain flowers, for example, might have indicated to our ancestors that they were safe to eat, while a foul smell might signal danger.
If we extrapolate this to modern times and add in the potential physiological effects of smell on our bodies, we should more urgently consider the idea of adding certain odors to the hospital environment. If the vanillin odor evokes happiness, then why not pump some of that smell into patients’ rooms? Perhaps this would have the positive effect of reducing stress in an already worried patient ? Maybe burning a little incense at the bedside would improve patient outcomes. Clearly more work needs to be done.
It makes one wonder what emotions would be evoked by the odor accompanying flatulence. That’s not a sense memory I want to explore!
Best wishes,
Jarrod Shapiro, DPM
PRESENT Practice Perfect Editor
[email protected]
References
-
Alaoui-Ismaili O, Robin O, Rada H, Dittmar A, Vernet-Maury E. Basic Emotions to Evoke by Odorants: Comparison Between Autonomic Responses and Self-Evaluation. Physiology and Behavior. 1997;62(4):713-720.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_lobe. Accessed August 31, 2015.
Get a steady stream of all the NEW PRESENT Podiatry
eLearning by becoming our Facebook Fan.
Effective eLearning and a Colleague Network await you. |
 |
This ezine was made possible through the support of our sponsors: |
| 
