Sophisticated diagnostic methods don’t need to be expensive. In fact, the most sophisticated piece of medical technology ever created might be over in the corner of your kitchen, licking leftovers off of your plate.
There are medical-alert dogs working with patients that can tell when a person with diabetes is about to have a blood sugar crisis, or when a person with narcolepsy is about to fall asleep, or a person with epilepsy is about to have a seizure. In three weeks you can train a dog to detect cancer with astonishing accuracy. “We are only at the start of working out everything dogs can detect,” the UK’s Daily Mail quotes researcher Dr. Claire Guest. “It would seem that almost any medical event has an odor change. The clever thing is that the dogs are able to work out what the norm is, and when it changes.”1
An article about canine detection in the New Yorker points to the superiority of dogs’ noses over technology. “In the 1970s, researchers found that dogs could detect even a few particles per million of a substance; in the 1990s, more subtle instruments lowered the threshold to particles per billion; the most recent tests have brought it down to particles per trillion.”
Paul Waggoner, a behavioral scientist at the Canine Detection Research Institute, at Auburn University, in Alabama, told the reporter. “It’s a little disheartening, really. I spent a good six years of my life chasing this idea, only to find that it was all about the limitations of my equipment.”2
One Labrador, for instance, was 98 percent as accurate as a colonoscopy when smelling stool samples, and 95 percent as accurate when smelling breath samples. But it gets better than that—because the dog could also differentiate polyps from malignancies, which a colonoscopy cannot. In addition, the dog was especially accurate at finding early-stage cancers, which are very hard to detect with standard tests, but which, if they can be found, greatly increase the patient’s chance of survival because they are easier to treat than late-stage cancers.3
“Detection of early-stage cancers is the real holy grail in bowel cancer diagnosis because surgery can cure up to ninety percent of patients who present with early-stage disease,” said Trevor Lockett, a bowel cancer researcher in Australia.4
Colonoscopies are highly invasive tests, they cost from $2,000 to $3,000, they require anesthesia, and they have some serious risks. When polyp-like masses are found by colonoscopy, they are snipped out of the intestines and then need to be examined (at more expense) in a laboratory to see if they are malignant.
Colonoscopies are also dependent on disposable supplies, high-tech equipment, and a functioning power grid. So why are we still using colonoscopies when we know that dogs can be trained to communicate diagnoses that are nearly as accurate and even more precise than a colonoscopy? Well, it turns out that dogs’ noses are poking around in areas where they really are not welcome.
In article after article about cancer-sniffing dogs, not a single article concludes that we should simply train more dogs to do this, and work with them side by side. Instead, the articles conclude that cancer-sniffing dogs will be useful to develop technology that can screen for the odors the dogs are detecting. In other words: figure out how the dog does it, then create a technology that mimics it and can be patented, and put that into use to generate profits in a way that a dog cannot.
Join me for a workshop to discuss resilience in health care systems on Thursday, April 9th.
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Jenny Stocks, “The Dogs That Can Detect Cancer: Meet The 4-Legged Bio Detectives Who Are Pioneering a Health Revolution,” Daily Mail, September 13, 2012.
Burkhard Bilger, “Beware of the Dogs,” New Yorker, February 27, 2012.
Eva Schaper, “Cancer Sniffing Dogs May Lead to Less Invasive Tests for Tumors,” Bloomberg, February 1, 2011.
Ibid.
