A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book. ~Irish Proverb

The Nose Knows

Did you know that a dog’s sense of smell is 100,000 times more powerful than a human’s?. My Chinese crested/Chihuahua dog Chili has an interesting talent. If I have a headache, he sniffs around my head and begins to lick my forehead. When I had problems with acid reflux, he was sniffing around my neck. I’ve always know that dogs have an uncanny sense of smell and an innate sense of when something is amiss. Then I heard about disease sniffing dogs—there’s lots of research being done on the canine ability to pick up the odor of disease.

Scientists in Paris trained a Belgian Malinois shepherd, a breed with a powerful sense of smell often used as drug and explosive sniffing dogs to be able to tell the difference between urine from men with cancer and healthy men. The dog's nose turned out to be more reliable than current diagnostic approaches. Pretty impressive, I’d say.

A leading medical journal in Britain, the BMI, published the results of the first ever meticulously controlled, double blind, peer-reviewed study on the subject, stating, “The results are unambiguous. Dogs can be trained to recognize and flag bladder cancer.”

Check out this short video about a woman who saved her dog Peanut’s life and then he wound up saving her life: (http://fortheloveofthedogblog.com/news-updates/cancer-sniffing-dog-video)

The claim of the Pine Street Foundation, (http://pinestreetfoundation.org/2009/08/18/pine-street-in-people-magazine/)which runs the clinic, is this: that dogs, given as little as three weeks’ training, can, by smelling samples of people’s breath captured in a special tube, detect cancers of the lung and breast even in their earliest stages — and can do so to a level of accuracy as good as and beyond that being achieved in conventional hospitals by the latest Cat, Pet and MRI scanners. For more information about this research, check out the Pine Street Foundation’s website: (http://pinestreetfoundation.org/2010/05/03/can-dogs-detect-cancer/)

But don’t worry. Just because your dog is sniffing you it doesn’t mean she’s detecting an illness. She might just be saying “how are you feeling today?”!