Why aren’t there more dogs at the doctor’s office?

Because they are unhygienic, they trigger allergies and fears, they carry a certain risk to attack humans, and above all, they are very unreliable.

Someone once said that dog&#x27;s noses are the closest thing we have to Star Trek tricorders. In Star Trek a tricorder is a handheld sensor that can seemingly detect anything in any situation, and as a Star Trek fan this description has always stuck with me.<p>Perhaps one day we&#x27;ll master electronic noses, but until then, dogs seem under utilized. If anyone&#x27;s looking for a high difficulty, high impact way of changing the world, look at electronic noses.<p>Human smell is also under utilized. I had a friend with a severe peanut allergy who could enter a house and immediately tell if there were peanuts in the house. Presumably most people possess such senses, but have no reason to use them.

A new study shows that ants are as effective as dogs at detecting cancer, and can be trained to do so in as little as 30 minutes [0]<p>That doesn&#x27;t explain dogs&#x27; absence, but one day it might.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.healthcarepackaging.com&#x2F;quick-hits&#x2F;article&#x2F;22118369&#x2F;ants-can-be-trained-to-detect-cancer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.healthcarepackaging.com&#x2F;quick-hits&#x2F;article&#x2F;22118...</a>

There are a lot of far-fetched claims made in the article that don&#x27;t pass the smell test (heh).<p>For example, in the article:<p>&gt; there is evidence that dogs can quickly and accurately detect COVID-19 infection<p>In the linked source:<p>&gt; but researchers say large-scale studies are needed before the approach is scaled up.<p>I imagine it is similar for every other diagnosis they tout. Small scale tests under ideal conditions very rarely survive real world application.

Because it would be a dogtor office...

Not sure I like where this is going, now I&#x27;m imagining dogs patrolling public areas and tagging random people for mandatory Covid quarantine.<p>Not being able to smoke a joint before crossing a border without risking harassment was bad enough.

Seeing some comments about the reliability of dogs, it’s good to keep in mind that traditional medical tests can also be quite unreliable. This link [1] explains how mammograms can have a “positive predictive value” (% alarms that are correct) of under 10% for many age groups. Maybe that’s what you want in a screening test to catch most of the bad stuff. And maybe dogs could be incorporated as one component of several.<p>Though, maybe similar to the sense of “unreliable” is that performance could vary a lot from dog to dog, or over time, in a way that might not be true for other tests. But Im not sure if that’s worth worrying about if the aggregate performance is quantified and comparable to other methods.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamanetwork.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;jama&#x2F;article-abstract&#x2F;409356" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamanetwork.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;jama&#x2F;article-abstract&#x2F;40935...</a>

A better title: Why Aren&#x27;t There More Dogs in Medical Labs, Sniffing &amp; Screening Samples?<p>Quick answer: What major stakeholder or gatekeeper would favor that situation? Beyond obvious regulatory issues, dogs sniffing samples is not patent-able, high-tech, high-status, nor high-profit.

Long story short, dogs aren’t reliable enough to be medical devices.<p>The whole “police dog” comparison is completely misleading. Drugs dogs are hilariously unreliable and are explicitly used by some departments solely to create probable cause.<p>And with SAR dogs, they don’t need to be reliable at tracking as long as they are better than humans.

A: Getting stuff approved requires VC or drug patent level revenues to study, and nobody will fund rigorous study of the capability of dogs and the protocols needed to utilize them appropriately.

&quot;OK sir, we&#x27;ve got your blood work, and we&#x27;d now like you to stop by the dog-detection office for a sniff test. That&#x27;ll help us eliminate some of the possibilities&quot;

If medicine used dogs, wouldn&#x27;t every doctor&#x27;s office need x different dogs trained in detecting x different diseases? Also, there are ethical considerations in employing living creatures that can not possibly be fairly compensated. Development and use of an artificial nose would be superior, because only one (system) would be required, compared to i don&#x27;t know how many dogs.

Allergies.

The title question can be answered with one sentence in the article itself: &quot;As with all preliminary scientific findings, there is still a need for large-scale, reproducible studies before researchers make broad claims regarding the usefulness of dogs in diagnostics work.&quot;

Because some people (including myself) have animal phobia. I have been bitten by stray dog at the age of 5. I am almost 30 and still can&#x27;t overcome my phobia. Upon seeing a dog or any other animal my flight instinct takes over.

Related: When your house&#x2F;office&#x2F;data centre&#x2F;whatever has an intermittent bad smell, what&#x27;s a good way to find the source?<p>I have a dog, but I&#x27;m not sure how to train it to locate smells I find objectionable.

I would assume the two main reasons are lack of access to this sort of dog training, as well as the impracticality of having a dog at a doctors office.

Detecting disease with dogs would seem to be an O(N) process: To detect N diseases, we need N dogs in the clinic. Is this really feasible?

In part because this. Nobody wants to deal with this people if avoidable<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_Dog_affair" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_Dog_affair</a><p>If you keep a dog in a lab you became a target for cruelty animal groups that will see your demise as an opportunity to spread their stance.<p>And in part because dogs made difficult to keep the clean space that is expected in this places.

Answer: Dogs kill 25 thousand people a year - they are not safe and people are allergic.<p>Edit: It isn’t rabies that makes them unsafe - just in the USA about 4.5 million Americans are attacked by dogs every year resulting in thousands of hospitalizations.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wemjournal.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;S1080-6032(09)70079-1&#x2F;fulltext" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wemjournal.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;S1080-6032(09)70079-1&#x2F;ful...</a>