Thanks for the diagnosis, Fido!!
Before I begin this entry, I want to let my readers know that I have been absent for a couple of weeks. There have been some technical difficulties, but I think they are all worked out now and I truly look forward to posting everyday, any and all information about the dogs that we love. So please start reading again, keep commenting, pass along this blog and enjoy!!!
How do you think you would feel the next time you went to your doctor’s office and in with him is not his nurse, but a dog who spends quite a bit of time sniffing you all over? Most of us would be horrified and hardly amused. However, there are dogs who have been trained to smell cancer cells which assists doctors in the diagnosis of this disease in many patients.
We know that dogs have been used for a long time to sniff out bombs, bodies-both dead and alive and even some “dvd smelling dogs” have helped to identify pirated dvd products at major airports and distribution centers. There are dogs currently trained to detect seizures in people who have epilectic seizures, low blood pressure and heart attacks.
According to Dr. Larry Myers, associate professor at Auburn University of Veterinary Medicine in Alabama, this isn’t magic. Dogs have an extremely heightened sense of smell and even subtle metabolic changes in a person due to the disease of cancer, can be identified by a dog that is trained to do so. For instance, a dog being used to detect prostate cancer would most likely be trained to identify urine that had a certain smell associated with prostate cancer.
This type of medical diagnosis tool has become so popular that there is a cnacer sniffing training institute in Japan known as the St. Sugar Cancer Sniffing Dog Training Center. One of the best trained dogs is a black lab named Marine. Marine is so good at what she does that they will be cloning the animal in South Korea in an attempt to produce a dog or dogs that will have the superb cancer cell sniffing ability that Marine possesses.
So let’s hope that in the future, there is a dog that can assist our physicians with the skills they are taught and the natural abilities they have to again, keep us both happy and healthy.
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