Dogs Can Tell if You Have Cancer
Dogs and Cancer
New tests show that German Shepherds can tell if men have prostate cancer. They smelled the urine of 900 men, 540 of whom didn’t have prostate cancer and 360 who did.
One German Shepherd was right 98.7% of the time and the other was right 97.6% of the time which is astonishing.
Read all about it by clicking German Shepherds detect Prostate Cancer
In another test another German Shepherd was able to detect Thyroid Cancer with 88% accuracy.
Sniffing You Out
Maybe that’s why dog’s often have a sniff of you. Perhaps they are trying to diagnose you. Perhaps they’ve spotted something and want to have a check.
Maybe this is something that the local Health Centre could use. After all it would be much cheaper than taking blood tests and sending them off to labs.
I think they would find the German Shepherds fairly reasonable to hire as well. A good meal once a day would be all they would desire. Just think how much they could save the country’s health service.
Specialists or Generalists
I’m not sure whether the dogs would have to be specialists when it comes to diagnosis or could be generalists. Would you need different types of dogs to sniff out different cancers. If the dog was a generalist, how would you train it to tell you what kind of cancer a person had?
Maybe Doctor McGinley, Doctor Duffy etc. would have to keep several different dogs, each with its own speciality.
You wouldn’t be too happy to hear “If you could just strip off and sit up there, I’ll go and get the dogs to sniff you over”.
Great Noses
I was once told that if you are cooking Spaghetti Bolognese, your dog could tell you all the ingredients in it from the smell (if he could talk).
Now, it looks as if dogs’ great sense of smell could be used to diagnose disease, quickly and accurately.
Dogs truly are Man’s Best Friend – in more ways than we thought!