Dogs can be trained to alert diabetics

If you grew up anywhere near Chicago, you know the name Ron Santo. He was the Cub’s third baseman and long time broadcaster, and he died at the age of 70, in December of 2010, of complications of bladder cancer. What you may not know is that he was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes when he was 18 and was told he would live to be only about 25. During his long baseball career, he never let the disease slow him down, but eventually he ended up with both legs amputated below the knee. 

In the wake of his death, his widow Vicki, a resident of Scottsdale, AZ, (close to Dogcheapsleeps.com’s headquarters) struggled to find the right way to honor her husband’s memory. Until, taking a new dog for training, a young man asked her if she were taking the dog in for training to diagnose a diabetic. 

It turns out dogs can be trained to alert diabetics! A dog attached to a diabetic that is having a problem with high or low blood sugar and can alert the patient or family members faster than a glucose testing monitor can do.

Vicki remembers the many times their dog, Joker, communicated to her that Ron was having problems. “Now that I look back on it, even when it was a small thing, Joker would find me to help Ron.”

The National Detection Dog Training Center says dogs have 220 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared with the 5 million for people. The dog smells the chemical reaction that takes place when the diabetic’s sugar is dropping.

For more information, see Alert Service Dogs, and to read Vicki Santo’s entire story, see The Daily Herald, a publication serving suburban Chicagoland.

For more information on Juvenile Diabetes, see the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. To help, you can Walk to Cure Diabetes in many cities across the United States.