A Houston-area woman has regained the ability to taste a year after contracting COVID-19 and believes that her chiropractor was key to regaining her senses. 

Mariana Duque had given up hope of tasting her food again, and her doctors had also given up hope on it, Fox affiliate KIVI-TV reported. 

"It was super frustrating. I actually cried multiple times over it," she told the news outlet. "I had to follow up and call them and say, even with all the medications that you guys put me on and the CT scan, nothing has helped. They told me that there's nothing else they can do, you just have to wait."

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Mariana Duque said she regained her sense of taste and smell after a back treatment.

Mariana Duque said she regained her sense of taste and smell after a back treatment. (KRIV)

A visit to a chiropractor for a lower back adjustment on the advice of her mother changed everything, she said. Dr. Ashley Price, of Price Health & Wellness in the Houston suburb of The Woodlands, said her fellow chiropractors have seen similar results. 

"It's so amazing and we've heard from a lot of other chiropractors in the community that they've been having this response, you know, people getting their taste and their smell back after an adjustment and we learned in school you know that the cranial nerves, the nervous system controls everything," she told the station. "With an atlas adjustment with the adjusting the first bone in the neck we can see amazing things, vision come back, hearing come back, but I never thought in a million years that I would be seeing so many patients get their taste and smell back."

"Basically, you have twelve sets of cranial nerves that exit the brainstem, and they supply the head, the face, the shoulders," she added. 

The adjustment involved a device called an arthostim that sends a tiny force to the first bone in the neck, which impacts the brainstem, cranial nerves, and taste and smell centers of the brain, Price said. The treatments are not guaranteed to work.

Duque said she is starting to enjoy her favorite foods again. 

"I actually did have to give up alot of my favorite foods because it didn't taste the same," she said. 

The loss of taste and smell became a telltale sign of a COVID-19 infection, according to a study published earlier this year in the Journal of Internal Medicine. Of the 2,500 patients across Europe involved, around 5% had not regained the ability to taste and smell within six months. 

Nurses wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) attend to patients in a Covid-19 intensive care unit (ICU) at Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Community Hospital on January 6 in Los Angeles.

Nurses wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) attend to patients in a Covid-19 intensive care unit (ICU) at Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Community Hospital on January 6 in Los Angeles. (Getty Images)

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Price said patients who have regained their sense of taste and smell have cried upon the change. 

"Really, the only thing that they can equate to is the adjustment because nothing else has changed," she said. 

One woman said she took advantage of her lack of senses and ate the spiciest Thai food she could think of, in addition to black coffee and black licorice candy.