What does therapy dog mean? A therapy dog is a breed of dog that works for humans

What does therapy dog mean? Dogs are man’s most loyal friends, and their cheerful shadows can be seen with their owners almost everywhere in our living environment. When talking about working dogs everyone will definitely think of guide dogs at the first instance. Trained guide dogs can help blind people to go to schools, stores, laundromats, street gardens and other places of life, and the movie called “Little Q the Guide Dog” left countless viewers with moving tears. But in addition to guide dogs, there is another type of canine that is increasingly being used in the medical field: the miracle therapy dog. Today in the United States, there is growing evidence that dogs can cure some diseases, and a group of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found in an experiment that the use of therapy dogs was effective for heart patients. In a 12-minute trial, volunteer patients exposed to therapy dogs showed a 24 percent reduction in anxiety levels compared to another group of patients not exposed to therapy dogs, an assertion supported by a similar trial at Massachusetts General Hospital, who found in their own experiments that therapy dogs reduced pain levels in patients. Trained “cancer-sniffing dogs” can have cancer recognition rates as high as 97%, and some foreign hospitals also use medical dogs to sniff patients’ urine to determine whether they have prostate disease. The urine of prostate cancer patients smells different from normal people because the cancerous cells produce different chemicals including secretion of an acidic odor. A dog’s sense of smell is tens of thousands of times more sensitive than a human’s, so it is able to distinguish very subtle differences and thus identify patients with prostate cancer. As research related to therapy dogs progresses, more uses are still being explored for applications.