Living with a dog is a healthy choice for people. The presence alone of the four-legged companion enhances the quality of life by serving calmness and concentration. The close relationship and gentle stroking of the furry friend increase levels of the well-being hormone oxytocin in the bloodstream of both humans and canines. Necessary outdoor activities, such as walking the dog, positively affect the physical condition of both the dog and its owner.
As a real tool to help humans, dogs use their superior sense of smell. Dogs have up to 300 million sensors in their olfactory mechanism, whereas humans have about five million. The sense of smell of dogs is some 100,000 times better than that of people.
Dogs are nowadays widely utilised in health care, for the benefit of other dogs and, increasingly, for humans. Guide dogs for the blind have served people for over a century, and these servants are now an everyday sight. Similarly, dogs can be trained to guide and give necessary warning for the deaf or people with poor eyesight.
Dogs’ extraordinary sense of smell is the principal feature of dogs that guide people with diabetes. The chemical clues in the metabolism of people with diabetes alert the body when blood sugar levels in the bloodstream get too low (Hypoglycemia) or too high (Hyperglycemia). A trained hypo dog can alert the owner in good time before the situation gets dangerous.
Similar alerts a dog can give in cases of neurological diseases, such as epilepsy and narcolepsy, as well as for the people who have occasional episodes of migraine and chronic pain. Trained dogs can alert and give a specific signal to their owner, often hours before a seizure occurs. A breakthrough in this sector is the training of dogs capable of detecting the onset of seizures in Parkinson’s disease well in advance.
In recent years, dogs that have identified human cancerous tumours have received a lot of publicity and sensational headlines. Nowadays, dogs are trained to recognise at least lung, breast, skin, prostate, bladder, ovarian, and cervical cancers. Dogs can also detect carriers of malaria, the deadliest infectious disease in the tropics.
Dogs are also proficient at identifying bacteria associated with hospital or urinary tract infections. The latest breakthrough in canine disease diagnostics is the detection of the coronavirus that has become a global pandemic.
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- Kai Aulio (Autor), 2026, Dog as a Medicine, Dog as a Doctor, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1708459
