What are the opening hours?

Monday 9am - 5pm Tuesday 9am - 5pm Wednesday 9am - 5pm Thursday 9am - 5pm Friday 9am - 5pm

Zara Patel, MD

Home
United States
Palo Alto, CA
Zara Patel, MD

Dr. Zara M. Patel is Director of Endoscopic Skull Base Surgery and Professor of Otolaryngology

01/27/2026

📞I was interviewed yesterday by Catherine Ho of the San Francisco Chronicle about the effects of pepper spray on the upper and lower respiratory system and eyes.
Click the link below for full article, but for those without a subscription, here are the highlights:
📌Pepper spray delivers capsaicin, sometimes mixed with other chemicals, to the mucosal membranes of the eyes, nose, throat, and lungs. It causes severe pain and burning and tearing, swelling, and cough.
📌Copious irrigation of the eyes, nose, and mouth with water will be the best way to dilute the spray and get it out of your system.
📌For most people, symptoms are temporary and last 20-90 minutes. For those with underlying disorders like asthma or COPD, this can trigger more dangerous and life-threatening problems, and those people should seek medical attention.
📌Despite fear and intimidation tactics being used by federal agents around hospitals and emergency rooms, know that doctors and nurses are here and standing ready to help any and all that seek care.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/pepper-spray-exposure-effects-21316693.php

01/22/2026

😍🙏🏼Thank you!! To be respected and valued by one’s peers is wonderful.

Stanford OHNS

01/16/2026

😵‍💫There were literally *thousands* of studies published in the scientific and medical literature last year regarding AI and healthcare.

🤗🤩So proud to have our work on automated machine learning and detection of sinonasal tumor transformation chosen as one of the very select group of studies recognized in the ARISE State of Clinical AI Report 2026 - a synthesis by leading experts of “the most significant developments, evidence, and emerging challenges in clinical AI”.
So many thanks to all my colleagues who contributed to that work!
This work shows the potential of imaging to eventually replace uncomfortable biopsies that may not always accurately reflect the entire tumor pathology, and could change the way medicine and surgery is practiced in the future.

👩🏻‍⚕️💪🏼Physicians taking a leading role in how AI is developed and implemented in healthcare is the only way forward to a bright and healthy future for all of us!

See the full report here:
https://www.arise-ai.org/report

Stanford OHNS

01/13/2026

❇️For many years, long before the pandemic, physicians (including myself) had considered using neuromodulators - medications such as gabentin, pregabelin and amitriptyline - to help patients with parosmia (distorted smell and taste).

❇️Some excitement occurred at the beginning of the pandemic when some patients seemed to respond to gabapentin,(shoutout to DO YEON CHO - who published that case series!) although it was a small number of patients and there was no control group in that study.

🛑Unfortunately, once gabapentin was run through a randomized controlled trial, (shoutout to Jay Piccirillo and his group at WashU who carried out that study) the conclusion was that gabapentin does NOT actually help patients with COVID-19 induced parosmia.

✴️As one of the criticisms of that trial was that the dose was too high to be well tolerated, and I have been treating patients with various neuromodulators and dosing ranges over the last 15 years with varying results, I asked our visiting scholar Kasia Resler to look into our patient outcomes.

❌This demonstrated that although parosmia in some patients improves over time, this is not linked consistently to treatment with gabapentin, pregabalin or amitriptyline. Rigorous scientific methodology is what allows us to differentiate between coincidence and spontaneous resolution, and real interventional differences. I’ll keep studying this disease process to find something that works for patients with this highly impactful problem! (Maybe electrical neuromodulation is the answer - working in that now!)
Link to our study just published in Rhinology here https://lnkd.in/gJ8wQetd

Stanford OHNS

12/02/2025

❤️Giving Tuesday is here!
If you have the capacity to donate, please consider donating to help support our research here at the Stanford Initiative to Cure Smell and Taste Loss.

▶️Smell is one of our most important protective defense mechanisms, it is how we make first impressions of each other, it is how you choose your lifelong mate, and it is how mothers and infants bond. It impacts every single human interaction, without us even realizing it.

🛑Losing the sense of smell causes a 4 fold increase in mortality - it is the only sense whose loss is linked to increased rate of death.
🧠This may be because loss of smell is one of the earliest signs of neurodegenerative disease. Diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and others.
🙏🏼To speed research in prevention and treatment of these diseases, please donate now at the link below to Make a Gift to the Stanford Initiative to Cure Smell and Taste Loss!
We greatly need and appreciate your help! (And you can write it off on your taxes! 🤗)

https://med.stanford.edu/smell/make-gift.html

Stanford OHNS

10/08/2025

💥Hardest and longest I’ve worked on a study in my life! Three years to complete, a year from presentation to publication, for those of you out there walking this path, you know an end result like this is only after a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.

🤖I know there’s a lot of AI news out there - but here we present a truly groundbreaking step - physicians with no coding background utilizing a publicly available AI platform to diagnose specific tumor types based on imaging alone. Could this lead to a future without need for painful, complex, and costly biopsy? Yes, yes it could.

💞So grateful and proud of all my co-authors who contributed in so many different ways - we could not have accomplished this without you.(Too many authors to tag - please tag yourselves!)

🔗Link to read this article published in Communications Medicine in the Nature portfolio - will be filed under their AI and Cancer section online.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-025-01134-9?utm_source=rct_congratemailt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oa_20251008&utm_content=10.1038/s43856-025-01134-9

09/18/2025

🧡💛🧡 Our friend and visiting scholar, Dr. Wongworawut from Thailand, completed the analysis on these patients of ours prior to the pandemic! After this study got lost in the shuffle and chaos of the ensuing years, I’m so glad to finally bring his hard work to publication and bring this interesting data to the field!

🧠 It turns out that when a pituitary tumor produces hormones, this doesn’t only affect the rest of the body - it directly affects the sinonasal tissue - the corridor we use to access and remove these tumors.
This changes quality of life for these patients, both before and after surgery, compared to patients with non-hormone producing tumors. But with the right post-operative care, these patients can have equally great outcomes!

Thanks to all my co-authors!
Yossawee Wongworawut
Peter Hwang Jayakar Nayak Robert Dodd and Juan C. Fernandez-Miranda

👩🏻‍⚕️Surgeons can use this data to better counsel and prepare their patients for what to expect after surgery. 🩺🔪Educating patients always leads to better surgical outcomes!

🔗Link to full study here:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40960129/

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine
Stanford University

09/10/2025

↗️ There are many steps needed in the development of a truly objective olfactory test and eventual stimulation device. Knowing how long topical anesthesia affects olfactory capability is crucial to understanding when we can start recording electrical signals once a device is comfortably placed.

A device such as this will allow us to test loss of smell more accurately, screen for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and eventually use electrical stimulation for regeneration.

☑️ This small step is now complete, thanks to help from Maxime Fieux, Esther Wang, and David Liu.
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Link to full study here:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/lio2.70250

The research and device design process is a slow and steady one. To donate to fund and speed our efforts, please visit our website: The Stanford Initiative to Cure Smell and Taste Loss and go to the Make a Gift tab. 🙏🏼💕

https://med.stanford.edu/smell/make-gift.html

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine

08/12/2025

We’ve had this news for a little while, and I am a bit behind on posting, but still wanted to share because I am so proud of our company, team, and CEO Parnian Lak - Olfera and our olfactory brain-on-chip is going to space! 🤩🤩🤩🚀

Investigating how neurons age in the accelerated aging environment of the International Space Station National Laboratory will allow us to learn so much about healthy aging and neurodegenerative diseases we experience here on 🌎, and thus allow us to develop better treatments for them.

05/31/2025

🦠As our nation’s healthcare administrators recommend removing COVID19 vaccination for pregnant women and children (groups long recognized by the medical community as vulnerable because of suppressed or not yet completely developed immune systems), millions of people in the US and around the world continue to get infected with the disease and suffer the long term consequences of having had the infection.

💔Although the majority of these people who lose their smell and taste from the infection will regain it on their own without intervention, at least 15-25% will have permanent loss - imagine never tasting another meal or drink for the rest of your life, imagine never smelling your child/partner/parent/ ever again, imagine never again smelling the sea air or the fresh scent of the forest or the comforting aroma of coffee in the morning.It is devastating to these individuals.

⭐️For the first time ever, we have found an intervention that may actually help prevent this loss of smell and taste from becoming permanent if taken early in the first week after diagnosis - a well known treatment for the infection itself - Paxlovid.

⚡️In the early days of the pandemic, we recommended this intervention to prevent major illness, hospitalization and death. Now that the symptoms are not as severe, physicians can still use this to help prevent LongCOVID disability like loss of smell and taste, along with other symptoms it has shown to prevent in other studies.
Importantly - in this era of mistrust in science - our study was NOT funded by any drug company!
🎙️Spread the word!

🔗Link to article:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40444408/

🤗Congratulations Esther Wang on getting this publication of ours over the finish line!

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine
Stanford University

05/22/2025

🙏🏼Thanks Amber Luong and The American Rhinologic Society for featuring our work on the latest It Out podcast from the International Forum of Allergy and Rhinology - the highest impact journal in all of !
💉🩸We discuss the Long term outcomes of PRP injections for Post-Viral Smell Loss.
🔗Link is here for those that want to take a listen:
https://www.scopeitoutpodcast.com

Visit the Treatment Options tab at our website
https://sicstl.stanford.edu for more information

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine
Stanford University

05/06/2025

So excited to announce our launch of the
⚡️Stanford Initiative to Cure Smell and Taste Loss!⚡️
I have been investigating the underlying causes of smell loss and treating patients with smell loss for the last fifteen years. Now, with evidence showing that smell loss could not only be the earliest sign of neurodegenerative diseases such as ’s and ’s, but in fact the olfactory cortex could be where the degeneration actually begins, research in this area is even more important and urgent!

Visit our website

https://sicstl.stanford.edu

to learn more!

If you have the capacity to donate to this important research, please visit the “Make a Gift” tab, and make a donation in honor of yourself or a loved one - each individual gift gets us that much closer to both treatments for smell and taste loss as well as early screening for dementia and potential treatments for AD and PD as well!
We are committed to moving forward and leading the way in science and medicine - help us if you can!

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine
Stanford University

Address

801 Welch Road
Palo Alto, CA
94035

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm

Telephone

+16507235281

Website

https://profiles.stanford.edu/zara-patel

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Zara Patel, MD posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Practice

Send a message to Zara Patel, MD:

Shortcuts

Address
Telephone
Opening Hours
Alerts
Contact The Practice
Claim ownership or report listing

Want your practice to be the top-listed Clinic in Palo Alto?