'Lab' testing - could dogs smell ME/CFS?

Perhaps they need the aroma of the "night-sweats". I recall reading that the aroma of "perspiration" in brucellosis patients was highly distinctive.

Mind you, it would be a clever dog that could sniff out a psychological problem.

Perhaps costs could be reduced further by training those award winning giant rats we have heard of lately.

 

A quick google search showed this site:

https://www.medicaldetectiondogs.org.uk/

https://www.medicaldetectiondogs.org.uk/neurological-diseases/

 

I got a couple of good miracle candidates for these dogs lol

 

Ah yes. But if the dogs can sniff out a psychological problem wouldn't there be a conflict of interest if therapy dogs are used in treatment?

 

A senior in my building owns a dog named Wessely.

 

Trained dogs are already used at the airport of Helsinki, Finland.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemima...i-airport-to-sniff-out-covid-19/#14e452b57331

 

The outcome of this trial run will be the real crunch. Would be excellent if it works. When they say the dogs only need a week's training, I presume by that they mean they are already trained medical detection dogs, who then get a week's specific Covid 19 training. Would be extremely interesting if they could distinguish between Covid 19 and other infections.

 

Re: 'Lab' Testing

I once saw video of a doctor advertising his practice. He concluded by saying something like "And for your convenience, we have our own on-site lab."

Cut to shot of happy Labrador Retriever sitting in the waiting room.

 

They can. It was on Scandinavian TV some days ago. The trained dogs had found arrivals at the International airport with COVID 19. Testing for the virus confirmed ongoing infections. This is big, isn´t it?

@JES, maybe you can tell us more?

 

Nice idea. What with all our metabolic changes it might very well work, too, eventually, just as soon as we have figured out a way to diagnose ME with much more certainty than the current diagnostic criteria can provide. Thing is you have to train the dogs - or rats* for that matter: imagine every GP clinic having a team of trained rats roaming the waiting room, that should reduce healthcare costs if nothing else, through drastically reduced GP visits, unless the BPS folks got in on it and set up rat-trauma or rat-desensitisation CBT clinics - right, where was I? Ah yes, you have to train dogs on samples of definitive ME, possibly even specifically on samples of definite ME with or without PEM.

Still, could be worth trying with a very narrowly defined group of pwME, maybe some with definite viral onset who've also had very clear CPET results and, if the dogs can find something to reliably distinguish them from definite non-ME cases, one could then work outwards from there, in a way testing what's really relevant in our current diagnostic criteria. The possibility of subgroups in ME could confound things though.

Could also be interesting to see if dogs trained on one sort of post-viral syndrome, assuming that's possible, would also indicate when presented with samples of different post-viral or post-infectious syndromes, and samples of ME.

* For those who missed @chrisb's reference, recently an explosive-sniffer rat was awarded a medal for its services.And, actually it would be kind of nice for 'lab' rats to be given a more agreeable task than forced swimming and other torture.

 

Our future:

 

since the world of medicine choses not to believe what patients tell them why would they believe in the dogs . also in many of the first years of having m e my body had a distinctive coppery odour i don't know if this is common .

 

Maybe they think dogs don't have false illness beliefs?

Some slightly tongue in cheek ideas here:

1) Get a medical detection dog charity excited about ME. Somehow...
This lot for example works with researchers at the University of Otago (Prof Tate's uni) on cancer detection.
https://www.k9md.org.nz/

2) Train your own dog:
https://store.huntersheart.com/Scent_Detection_Foundation_Online_Dog_Training_C_p/sdf.htm

3) Train a rat or three, apparently it takes 9 months for them to learn how to detect TB reliably, not sure if that's faster or slower than a dog (but in any case a rat would be cheaper to feed):
https://www.apopo.org/en/what-we-do/detecting-tuberculosis/how-we-do-it/tb-detection-rat-training

 

Rats that drive tiny cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO11r_8_Xe4

 

Going into a straight line until you crash into something, not sure that's an approved driving technique, and fairly sure that if human that rat would end up in prison.

It's also not a car, it's a plastic sweet jar on wheels, with no obvious means of steering, which may explain the fairground driving technique.

 

I hope Amazon doesn't find out about this.