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THE HEALING POWER OF CANCER SNIFFING DOGS
By Sharon Sakson
In 2000, Michael McCulloch, cofounder of the Pine Street Foundation in
San Anselmo, California, met Dr. James Walker at a conference on scent at the
Florida Sensory Research Institute. The Pine Street Foundation is an institution
committed to investigating any alternative or experimental therapy to help
patients beat cancer. Dr. Walker had done the first research that proved
scientifically the power of a dog’s nose, a power 10,000 times greater than a
human’s.
McCulloch wanted to know if minute scents of lung cancer and breast
cancer are carried on a person’s breath. As yet, this was unproven because there
was no way at the time to measure and determine scientifically what those scents
were, and if they existed, whether or not they could be detected.
McCulloch, in consultation with Dr. Walker, set about finding out. The
doctor obtained an apricot Standard Poodle from Canada, named Shing Ling,
and started her with a dog trainer, Kirk Turner, when she was only nine weeks
old.
He had his patients’ breathe deeply and exhale into tubes filled with
polypropylene wool. Then the tubes were sealed. Kirk Turner taught Shing Ling to
sniff the tubes. When she reached a tube known to contain the breath of a
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cancer patient, he clicked and gave her a treat. After many repetitions, Shing Ling
became an outstanding detector of cancer.
She was right 99 percent of the time, a percentage believed by dog
trainers and K9 handlers the world over, but laughed at by people in the medical
and scientific communities.
“Their figures are simply too good to be true,” one doctor from Stanford
University told a reporter. “It is not possible to obtain a 100 percent result,
certainly not from a dog.”
McCulloch felt that Shing Ling had a normal dog’s sense of smell. He
didn’t want people to think there was something extraordinary about her, so he
recruited other dogs. Three were Labrador Retrievers, two were Portuguese
Water Dogs. None of the dogs had any prior experience using their noses for any
such activity.
A Polish researcher, Professor Tadeusz Jezierski, Sc.D., of the Polish
Academy of Sciences, traveled over from Poland to be lead investigator. The
study was conducted over a period of four months in 2003; 12,295 separate scent
trials were documented on videotape. Not only did the dogs perform exceptionally
well, they did so consistently,distinguishing the breath of 55 lung cancer patients
and 31 breast cancer patients from 83 healthy controls. If the dog detected
cancer, he was trained to sit or lie down. For breath from lung cancer patients,
McCulloch reported, the dogs sat correctly 564 times and incorrectly 10 times.
For the breath from healthy patients, they sat 4 times and did not sit 708 times.
With adjustments made due to other factors, the researchers determined the
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accuracy rate at 99 percent.
The success rate of the clinic's study, as Dr. Donald Berry, from the M. D.
Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said, ''is off the charts: there are no
laboratory tests as good as this, not Pap tests, not diabetes tests, nothing.''
McCulloch wrote in his report:
“What is important about this study is that (1) ordinary dogs, with no prior
scent discrimination training, could be rapidly trained to identify lung and breast
cancer patients by smelling samples of their breath, when compared to blank
unused sample tubes; (2) dogs could accurately and reliably distinguish breath
samples of lung and breast cancer patients from those of healthy controls; and
(3) the dog's diagnostic performance was not affected by disease stage of cancer
patients, age, smoking, or most recently eaten meal among either cancer
patients or controls.”
The results are astounding. Dogs with three weeks of training could detect
cancer better than the latest CAT, PET, and MRI scanners, better than chest x
rays and sputum cytology. The breed of dog didn’t matter. The stage of cancer
didn’t matter. The dogs picked it up, whether the patient was barely in Stage 1 or
had progressed to invasive, metastasis Stage 4.
The results of the study were written up in the March 2006 issue of the
journal Integrative Cancer Therapies titled, “Diagnostic Accuracy of Canine Scent
Detection of Lung and Breast Cancers in Exhaled Breath.”
"We set out to see if cancer has a smell and if people with cancer have a
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different smell than people without cancer," Broffman said. "We were impressed
with how well the dogs did."
A Japanese film crew came to make a documentary about Pine Street’s
cancerdetection dogs. As the filmmakers were setting up their cameras, getting
ready to tape Shing Ling, the dog quietly went over to the cameraman and sat on
his foot. He just thought she was being friendly, so he patted her on the head,
and continued to work. Shing Ling stopped him by sitting on the cameraman’s
foot again, then looking pointedly at the trainer.
The trainer gave her a treat and told the doctors. It turned out his lungs
had been xrayed just before he left Japan, but the results were inconclusive.
McCulloch urged him to see his doctor immediately upon his return. It turned out
that the man had lung cancer.
“After that, people started getting worried if Shing Ling sat too close to
them,” McCulloch said.
If dogs can recognize such odors, the implications for medicine could be
enormous. Their noses might provide early detection that science cannot yet
achieve.
Dr. Walker said there was an unexpected, and heartbreaking, side to his
research. Every time his studies make the headlines, he is flooded with phone
calls, mostly from women, pleading with him to have his dog screen them for
cancer. Dr. Walker has to explain that he can’t do that. He is not a medical doctor.
The testing is in an early phase. It is not an approved method. But he says the
women don’t care. Often, they have had cancer, and gone through surgery,
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chemotherapy, and extensive treatment. They know that the rate of recidivism for
cancer is extremely high And they also know that current methods of detection
are highly fallible. The women are terrified that the cancer might have come back.
It’s not that they don’t trust their doctors. They do. It’s just that they are willing to
put their trust in dogs.
They are completely convinced of a dog’s olfactory ability and his
willingness to use it. Maybe they have their own dogs, so they know that dogs are
always paying more attention to you than you do to yourself.
Why then has no research been funded to study using dogs as cancer
detectors?
Dr. Walker said the answer was easy: It’s because they are dogs, and
scientists are people who long for approval and acceptance in the world at large.
The idea of dogs detecting cancer is only a joke to most doctors. Scientists like
Dr. Walker, who design studies to prove the olfactory powers of dogs, are
showered with derision. The general idea put to them is, “Come on, grow up and
do some real science. Quit messing around with dogs.”
Dr. Wallace Sampson, editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative
Medicine, and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Council
Against Health Fraud, was quoted in a newspaper article as saying, "I think it's
this side of absurd. People's odors are such that any odor from a cancer cell
would be overwhelmed by all of the smells given. Those smells would overwhelm
the receptor. To say that cancer would suddenly be detectable by dogs is too far
out for most scientists. It's implausible."
That sort of denial angers Dr. Walker, because, he says, “No one is
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saying, ‘we will use only the dog to look for cancer.’ Cancer is very complex.
Right now, there are many methods used to detect it, the doctor In his office,
blood work, biopsies, MRIs, second opinions. We’re not saying, ‘Let’s replace X
rays, C.T. scans, fiberoptic scopes, mammograms, Pap smears and other
cancer screens with dogs.’ We’re saying, ‘Here’s an incredible tool which might
help save your patients’ lives.’ Why laugh at it and turn it away?”
By Sharon Sakson
(based on research done for Paws & Effect: The Healing Power of Dogs)