Alex wrote about a new technique of listening for cancer cells which I
think is really important.

Hopefully this will be the beginning of an era when the peculiar
sensory characteristics of tumors will be used to diagnose ca's with
minimally invasive tools.  This is already happening in other ways.

The technique Alex mentions is really exciting because it can pick up
ca signals in a cluster of  only 10 melanoma cells.

Along these lines, doctors have known for years that dogs can SMELL
melanoma.  This was first reported in the British Journal Lancet in
1989 and substantiated in subsequent studies.  I have seen a number of
"Miracle Dog" tv shows about  pets who were sniffing at, pawing at and
even trying to bite off their owner's peculiar skin lesions. In one
case, a man who had had two negative biopsies was so pestered by his
dog that he got a third one and it ended up being positive for
malignant melanoma.

MSNBC reported that researchers are trying to recruit dogs to diagnose
prostate cancer.  People who find the thought of a dog sniffing their
butts or their privates distressing should have no fear, say the
researchers.  "The dogs don't actually smell men's genitalia, they
sniff urine samples instead."  (From "Is there a doctor or dog in the
house?  Canine sense of smell could help diagnose disease, 11/17/04,
msnbc.msn.com/id/5183290)

Personally, I  had an up-close experience of a biopsy about a year ago
and  based on that would be very happy to be examined by a K-9 doctor
instead. I was told by the nurse that there would just be a "tissue
scrape" and the whole Procedure would take 5 minutes.  She said my
husband need not even bother to come.  Instead, I was given one
klonopin (mild tranq) "anesthesia."  (LOL)  Of course, I was wide awake
during the whole thing and I could feel this Monster cutting away at my
innards with garden shears  and poking at my viscera with knitting
needles.  The pain was indescribable.  In spite of my bloodcurdling
screams the dr ignored my pleas to stop. When I came to, I clocked the
time of the Procedure as 1/2 hour.

Based on this I would much rather have had Dr. Fido as a diagnostician.
I prefer the sniff to the knife.

Besides, dogs have been shown to produce more accurate results than
other diagnostic procedures.. "What makes a dog superior at diagnosis
is that its sense of smell is so sophisticated that it is able to smell
multiple layers of chemicals", according to a researcher, Dr. Myers
(quoted by MSNBC).   He adds, "Dogs don't detect a single chemical but
a combination of them. If they were identifying just a single chemical,
medicine might have picked up on it.  The dog may be doing something
better ."

Dogs have been shown to be 98-100 percent accurate in diagnosing
melanomas but controlled experiments have been hard to perform, say
scientists. A major obstacle has been finding willing patients.

This kind of makes me wonder.  How many of you who have undergone
painful, bloody biopsies for pca would not swap a little personal
dignity for a pain-free diagnostic procedure.  Maybe they are just not
recruiting the right patients.

Doctors say that if doggie diagnosis continues to be accurate K-9s
could  make "a significant contribution to public health."  "It's going
to be very useful for large-scale screening of populations," said Dr.
Myers.  "And it's certainly going to be effective in third-world
countries that don't have the resources to do sophisticated lab tests."

I suspect this view is kind of narrow; it might just catch on with
first-world patients who would rather be sniffed than stabbed.

I can foresee a day when dogs will replace radiologists and
pathologists, which sounds really nice except that I'm sure that
medico-corruption would soon take hold.  Drug cos. would be bombarding
K-9s with boxes of frosty paws and sending them on junkets to doggie
spas.  And instead of the pharmaceutical "salesmodels" you see in doc's
offices today there will be a bevy of beautiful bitches (the real kind)
holding briefcases full of samples.  And so it goes...

To the guy who has that restless Lab, maybe you should enroll it in
doggie "medical school."  Dogs of all breeds are being recruited and
the salary and benefits are good.

Good luck to you all.

Leah