Can Dogs Detect Health Problems in People?
Dog Detectives
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While dogs probably aren't going to be used to diagnose cancer any time soon, they are at work right now helping people manage other diseases and health problems. You've probably seen service dogs assisting people who are visually, hearing or physically impaired, but dogs have been trained to do much more than help out people living with challenges like these. Service dogs are used today to assist people who have everything from neurological disorders to diabetes. Obviously, this is very different from directing a visually impaired person on the sidewalk or letting a hearing impaired person know that someone is at the door. This is where dogs' keen perception comes in. Instead of being trained to pay attention to outside cues, dogs can learn to pick up on signs from their owners that something is wrong.
In the case of people with psychiatric conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or anxiety disorders, dogs can learn to tell when their human companion is feeling anxious or paranoid through body language and changes in behaviour. Dogs provide stability and emotional support; they also remind their handlers when to take medication. Service dogs for autistic people not only help them deal with processing auditory and visual stimuli, but they also alert them to behaviors they might not realize they're engaging in, such as self-harm or self-stimulation.
Dogs have also saved lives by alerting people to health problems before they even occur. Alert dogs let their type 1 diabetic human companions know that their blood sugar levels are off before the person feels any symptoms or takes a blood test. Low blood sugar changes the volatile organic compounds emitted through the pores of a diabetic; the dogs let their owners know of this change by whining or licking their hands. Dogs have also alerted humans to changes in their blood pressure or even let them know when a heart attack was imminent.
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