Ask a dog for the diagnosis: some people smell like cancer

Jim  & Diane Walker

Professional golfer Phil Mickelson announced he would leave the pro tour to be with his wife, who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Many people can relate to this scary situation. I know I can. My mother died of breast cancer when I was twelve years old.

Back then; my dogs helped me get through the loneliness and grief. What I didn’t know then was that dogs have the capability to help humans far beyond mere comfort. Specially trained detection dogs are able to find melanomas before they break through the skin and prostate tumors before they start to grow. No other medical device can match the power of a dog, not digital dermatoscopy or biomedical laboratory processes or x-ray machines.

In three groundbreaking studies, dogs successfully discovered cancer on skin, in urine samples, and in breath samples. Then, they made what appeared to be mistakes; indicating cancer where blood tests and CAT scans said there was none.

In each case, several months later, the cancer showed up, exactly as the dog indicated, whether barely Stage 1 or invasive, metastatic Stage 4. In other words, they were reaching beyond Stage 1, to a new, previously undiscovered platform, Stage Zero.

An amazing scientist, Dr. James Walker of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, documented the power of a dog’s nose in 2002. Using n-amyl acetate (nAA), Dr. Walker documented that a dog can detect chemicals at one ten-thousandth to one hundred-thousandth the concentrations that humans can. In other words, at a minimum, dogs can smell 10,000 times better than a human.

As cancer cells break down healthy cells, minute amounts of formaldehyde are released. Gas chromatographs can detect cancer, but chromatographs top out at detecting one part per billion. At one part per trillion, dogs can do the job much, much better.

But medicine and science are reluctant to use trained dogs. Partly, I think, because people are squeamish about dogs into a medical setting. But in a canine cancer-detecting clinic, the patients would never see the dogs. The dogs would be like laboratory technicians, indicating cancer in Petri dishes and breath tubes.

Dr. Walker’s dogs sniffed a few volunteers who potentially might have melanomas. But the definitive diagnosis was made in the laboratory and by dermatologists. They proved the dogs were correct.

Dr. Walker says women who have had melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, often call him asking to have his dog, Stormy, sniff them. They live with the ever-present fear that cancer has come back and there is no certain way to detect it.

Dr. Walker can’t; he’s not a medical doctor; the tests are experimental; it is not an approved method. But the women don’t care. They are willing to put their trust in dogs.

It’s an easy and inexpensive tool to detect cancer that is underutilized. Pray that someone begins validating the work of cancer detecting dogs before someone close to you needs their help.
 

FOR MORE INFO: The complete story on dogs finding cancer is in my book, Paws & Effect: The Healing Power of Dogs.