Looking for feedback from Uny or anyone that might recognize the following as fitting some sort of recognizable cause....and some of you know me, I try to be thorough on the first go around, so here is the long and short of the background of the ailment I'm suffering right now.

19 months ago I quit smoking after 30 plus years of approx 3/4 to 1 pack a day. Prior to quitting my sense of smell & taste had gradually diminished / dulled over the years. That is no surprise to me given the various side effects from smoking. The part that surprises me is that some of these ear / smell / taste / sinus problems have gotten worse since I gave up the smokes. For many years I'd been having recurring problems with aches in the ears ( especially the E-tubes ). I'd always thought of these ear problems as caused by something I was proned to / born with and which the smoking merely made worse. The ear aches usualy effected only 1 ear at a time, the right ear more often than the left. Many times the left ear would flare up seemingly as a reponse to having just knocked out the problem in the right ear... almost as if the germs / bugs / virus / bacteria / whatever got the bright idea to swim away from where all the herbs were showing jup and towards the untreated half of my head ... if that's possible. The ear symptoms are like a somewhat predictable cycle wrapped around a bit of crap shoot / mystery. Whenever there is a given onset of ear/tube aches, some times it would go away on its own after a day or two....but more often than not it would linger for several days during which I knew I better do something or else it would progress to the next phase - piercing pains in ear drum - that I suspect was like a final warning before the inner ear or ear drum became infected ( and or bealed ).

For the past couple years that " do something " that provided middling success was using garlic oil combined with B&B tincture to head off the lingering symptoms from reaching the stage of piercing pain and infection. FYI I had tried ear candling before disovering the oil & tincture method. I decided that ear candling was okay as long as I did not have any onsetting problems, but if / when I did have onsetting ear / tube ache problems, the symptoms got markedly worse and spread after candling....and since for me some times once is not enough, I repeated this same mistake during a bout of ear / tube aches several months removed from the first mistake..... AND produced nearly identical results - spread symptoms after ear candling ! Twice was enough for me. I have not candled again since the second time of things getting worse. So now I regularly turn to oil & tincture to treat onsetting ear / tube ache...and have adopted JR Christopher's advice to put the oil & tincture in the canal and plugged with cotton BUT also slathering ( first the oil, then the tincture ) onto to the lymph spots along the jaw line and neck / throat areas on same side as the problem ear/ tube.... 9 times out of 10, one or two nights of this treatment will usually knock out the problem at least until the next time.....that is the good news, but part of the bad news is that I have never been able to knock this problem out for good, it keeps coming back! Another part is that 10th time when the oil / tincture ( the same batch ) does not do the trick. When I get to that point I will try putting 3 percent peroxide into the ailing ear. Luckily so far this has always been able to knock out that " 10th "..... but still, the fix has only been temporary. Right now I'm in the middle of a bout and have not had success using the oil / tincture... I suppose it is possible my batch of oil has lost potency....?... I am still not sure about how the long term viability of a batch of garlic oil works....so I'm just throwin this out there as a possibility. By the way, for a few years I've been relying on a batch of my own home made garlic oil, the B&B was made for me by Barefoot. I once kept the oil in the frig. I asked Dr Mom about potential problem for garlic oil to go bad or rancid but she did not think this something to worry about....does anyone know if or how garlic oil does not go bad / rancid? The thing is, with my severely diminished sense of smell, I can not really tell by smell when something has gone bad/ rotten /rancid ( like food in general, not just herb stuff ) so this concerns me. Anyway, I have since gone to keeping the garlic oil on a pantry shelf and it does not look any worse for the wear...and when I use it in the ear, it does not feel like it has gone bad. The tincture I keep in a cool dark air tight jar , so I doubt that it has gone bad or weak.

When I quit the smokes I assumed that a lot of this would improve BUT I also believe that I was born with a predispostion for ear / throat / sinuse problems... I had my first bealed ear ( ruptured ear drum ) at the age of 10, which was several years before I began smoking. Upon quitting I had especially looked forward to regaining the heightened sense of taste that many ex smokers have said is one of the joys of giving up smokes and sets in sometime around the 2nd or 3rd week post ... but was not my experience. :(

About the best news I"ve had since quitting is that the constant wheeze is gone... which I suspect was borderline emphysema ( some family history for this ) . I'd also lost the really bad smokers hack that had developed over 30-plus years of that filthy habit. My breathing is now much stronger, especially since having taken up a regular and somewhat intense exercise regimen that began a few months after quiting and has been ongoing for close to 18 months.

One of the aspects of this that seems strange to me is that my sense of taste & smell gradually got worse after quitting to the point ( now ) that I can barely taste or smell anything except the most strong and pungent foods / drinks / aromas.... and the on-again off-again recurring problems with ears / tubes is still nagging me ... i can only guess that I'd smoked so long that the damage dones is more than I had imagined.... or else there is a cure out there for me if I can only figure out how to get it. The sinuses are also showing some symptoms but somewhat mild. For instance, as soon as the weather turns the slightest bit cold and I spend time out doors, my nose runs like a fawcett ... have been this way for years and this has not really changed much since quitting. And I have the new occasional problem that if I blow the nose too hard I may end up with a mild nose bleed. Also something tha thas bothered me for years and has not gotten any better is bed / sleep time. If I lie on my left side this will cause my sinuses to clog within 2 minutes or less, which forces me to breath through the mouth which in turn causes me to constantly awken during the night....ergo I usualy sleep on my right side...... I'm really baffled that lying on one side the sinuses block up but the other side leaves them relatively clear.....?

One other thing that is sort of new in all of this is my sleep routine. Whether this has any bearing on the ear / tubes / smell / taste / sinus problems ... ? ... I dunno. I am sort of 50-50 on this. I think the sinuse problems, especially when I end up breathing through the mouth, definitely impacts my sleep... and I really dislike waking up with the inside of the mouth so dry that the tounge and throat have hardly any moisture. Plus or minus, I now find that I am regularly sleepy and ready for bed by 11PM every night. I generaly have no problems falling asleep ( unless I make the mistake of turning to my left side ). As a general rule, I sleep on my right side and yes, I'm a stomach sleeper, I know from the perspective of chiropracty, this is not good, but it is an engrained habit that is quite difficult to break. So the new problem I have is REMAINING asleep for what I consider a good / full night's sleep ( like, 7 to 8 hours ). For whatever reason I can no longer get a good nights sleep. This is for the guy who, in his college years ( party hardy era ) has attained the nick name "sleepy" due to the knack of sleeping 10 to 12 hours at a clip. The new pattern is, I fall asleep some time shortly after 11PM and like clock work I will awake at 5:30 AM. If I try not to roll around too much I can sometimes get back to sleep for another 1/2 to 1 hour, but more often than not I can not get back to sleep, so I usually end up 30 to 60 mins of trying to fall back asleep before deciding to get out of bed.
But, by around noon, especially after lunch, I get sleepy and am prone do drifting off into light sleep for 30 mins to an hour or so... just adding these sleep symptoms just in case somebody sees a connection.

If you do a simple web search for " lost smell / taste", chances are good you will go down a path that suggest the presence of " polyps ". I don't know that I have polyps. I don't know that I don't have them either, but the possibilityh consistently shows up on searches for causes to problems with smell / taste accompanied by some sinuse problems like nose bleeds. I have not found much of anything from the old time herbalists on polyps. The closest I have found from JRChristopher book is a brief mention of " polypus " that is either a spelling error, or a slang name for polyps or a name for something that looks like mispelled BUT is actually something else all together.

To recap, I've lost my sense of taste and smell and want to regain them, if possible, without meds or other orthodox procedures such as surgery. Likewise I'd like to be able to do something to at least reduce the problems / occurence of problems with the ears / tubes / sinues, but I don't know what I'm up against - caused by predispostion or by lifestyle / lifestyle damage, or some combination?