By Priya, for Mendittrosa x Kölam Health

For most of my career as an emergency physician, healing meant trying to bring order to crisis. It was measurable, urgent, procedural. During the Covid years, that framework began to fracture. The constancy of urgency—alarms, ventilators, decisions made in seconds—dulled my capacity to feel. The sensory world faded and I became contracted to an intellectual, cortisol-fueled state.

My reawakening came, unexpectedly, through scent.

On a trip to London, I visited Guerlain, where Omar spoke about what different fragrances made him feel—freshness, nostalgia, memory. This led me to Parfums de Marly, also in Covent Garden, where Rodrigo and Mujtaba listened with such generosity, even smelling my arm and suggesting which scent connected more to my essence. Together, they composed a long list of scents to explore nearby. At Bloom, Michel sprayed each fragrance one by one, sharing his impressions and inviting mine. Through each of them, I felt accompanied—guided deeper into the layers of scent and self, each exchange an act of attention and care. It was there that I first encountered Mendittrosa, and came into contact with that deep sensory world.

Each encounter opened another dimension of perception. The vastness of scent—the way a single composition could evoke warmth, disgust, comfort, excitement, tension—reawakened in me a sense of awe. For the first time in years, I felt connected again: to my body, to beauty, to something larger than myself and to the suffering that people experience in times of crisis.

Scent, in this way, becomes a language of coherence—a bridge between physiology and emotion. At Kölam Health, this scent journey mirrored what we teach and practice: mind, body, and spirit are not separate systems. They are one ecology of information and feeling. Symptoms are not failures; they are signals.

Mendittrosa understands this. Each fragrance is designed not only to please but to recalibrate—to bring the inner and outer worlds into dialogue. Care, in this context, is not just clinical. It’s sensory, relational, and deeply human.

Lately, the scent that speaks to me most directly is Mauna. It creates in me a physical and emotional stillness—a quieting of the internal noise that mirrors the external. From that stillness, I can move with intention and ease. It reminds me that healing does not always mean doing more. Sometimes it means allowing space for silence, and letting beauty do its quiet work.

Scent has become, for me, a form of medicine—one that restores coherence, presence, and the capacity for wonder.

You can learn more about this integrative philosophy of healing at kolam.health.

Priya Sury, MD, D.Phil (PhD)