In this case, it was a Golden Retriever’s nose. Her name is Wrigley, and she knew something wasn’t quite right with her human companion, Steve Werner.

Steve’s doctor hadn’t been able to figure out why he’d been experiencing some troubling symptoms like ringing in his ear and a feeling of unease.

Then in July, Wrigley started to behave strangely.

Every day when Werner would curl up next to his beloved canine at his Brentwood home, she would turn, focus on his right ear and sniff doggedly.

“I thought it was just a friendly sniff,” Werner said. “But after four or five days, I realized she seemed to be focusing on something. At some point, I noticed she was always sniffing at the opening of my right ear. She would set herself up and intently smell my ear.”

One day, Werner was watching TV when a feature about cancer-sniffing dogs grabbed his attention. What he heard propelled him back to his doctor’s office.

A subsequent MRI revealed a non-malignant tumor that has since been surgically removed.

You may have heard similar accounts, or that some people are training dogs to screen people for cancers. The thinking is that cancerous cells emit chemicals that are not present in healthy cells.

I had to laugh at one part of the article, though. It describes a study conducted by the Pine Street Foundation in California. For the study,

[R]esearchers collected breath samples in plastic tubes from 83 healthy volunteers, 55 lung cancer patients and 31 breast cancer patients.

The tubes were numbered and placed in plastic boxes and presented to the dogs, five at a time. If the dog detected cancer, it was trained to sit or lie down. Researchers determined that the dogs were accurate 99 percent of the time in detecting lung cancer and 88 percent of the time in detecting breast cancer.

But then the article goes on to say “Not everyone is wagging their tails about the dog studies.”

The results of the lung and breast cancer study were too good to be true, said Donald Berry, chairman of the department of applied biostatistics and applied mathematics at the University of Texas-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

“It’s essentially impossible that anything could be that good,” he said.

lol

I dunno, Don. I’ve definitely encountered some things that are that good!!!