Does anybody have a reference for this? I searched Google but couldn’t find anything specific.
For example: if your sweat was to smell of say, chlorine, what might this indicate?
:dubious: hmmm. I’m guessing that’s not a totally accurate method, but sonds interesting
and it sounds interesting too
In theory, this practice might work, but I’d say that in practice it deserves to be on Quackwatch.
There’s also a group of people hoping to get funding for a study on whether or not dogs can be trained to “smell” cancerous cells, presumably as a pre-screening method.
-lv
First, I want to quantify this reply: I am a nurse, I’ve worked in Intensive Care and Emergency Room. Most of this is anecdotal at best.
I have gotten to the point where I can (sometimes) predict what bacteria may be infecting a person based on smell. They all have very distinct smells. Psuedomonas and Staph Aureus are the 2 that you will never forget…esp in open wounds. Also necrotizing facisitis (aka flesh eating bacteria) have a very distinctive smell to them. Certain cancers smell different; every thing from sweet to sour. And sometimes, on some people, you can even smell their death coming (although you can probably chalk that up to nursing premonition/superstition). While a lot of these smells are distinctive and usually fairly accurate, we still base everything on cultures, be it blood, wound or sputum.
I don’t think that smell has become a lost art…in some patients its hard to ignore, I just think that diagnostics have reached a point where smell just becomes the reason to run a certain test. Also, from a litigation stand point, it’s hard to stand in court and say “They smelled like they had a staph pneumonia” without some actual empirical data.
Schizophrenic people are well known to have a “goaty” aroma.
It is also common knowledge that advanced tubercular patients have a “baked bread” smell.