Last month some of our team took a visit to the charity Medical Detection Dogs, an amazing organisation focused on training dogs to help people with life-threatening health conditions.
The passion and commitment the scientist and volunteer trainers exude just blew our team away, but obviously the real stars of the show were the dogs!
These dogs save lives; it’s just surprising how they can be trained to identify many types of cancer as well as Parkinson’s disease and blood sugar levels for diabetes sufferers. All thanks to the dogs nose, and a dogs ability to detect minute odour traces created by diseases. Compared to traditional methods of diagnosing these illnesses, using the dogs is quicker and far less intrusive. The charity mentioned that all dogs have this ability to sniff out disease, but they use mainly working breeds such as Labradors and working spaniels that have a high hunt drive.
Each of the dogs are incredibly smart and well trained; we saw this first hand when we watched them successfully identify cancer samples provided by hospitals in seconds. I mean literally seconds!! But it’s not all work for the dogs they only work for around 20 minutes a week at the training centre in Great Horwood and then they have lots of opportunity for playtime and games and they all live in normal homes with caring families.
The detection dogs do so much for the people they help, alerting them of their illness before it has a chance to do any damage. One of the people we met on the day who benefits greatly from the charity is Claire, she was accompanied by Magic who has been trained to alert Claire when her blood sugar levels change. Without Magic, Claire would be at a higher risk of harm through her illness. These dogs are enhancing people’s lives and working – What a win win situation.
Click here to watch Claire's story with her medically trained dog
We asked if they provide a screening service but they stated that at this present time they don’t offer such a service, the dogs work on samples in the bio detection room at the training centre only and are not trained to detect the odour on a person.
We couldn’t believe that this charity gets no government support; they run purely from donations and volunteers to support the ground breaking work they do.
They’re always looking for more volunteers socialisers, for puppies and dogs to begin the socialising process as well as volunteer fosterers who will look after their dogs on a temporary basis and of course not to forget continued support with fundraising and donations. If you’d like to visit or help this amazing charity then please get in contact with dawn.taylor@medicaletectiondogs.org.uk
