SAN DIEGO — There’s something calming about a dog, their presence and touch can take away all the worries in the world and provide a unique healing power.
Rady Children’s Hospital wants that type of medicine, but it needs donors to fund its own Resident Canine Therapy Program.
CBS 8 is Working FUR Kids to share the scientific evidence behind the impact therapy dogs have in hospitals.
Witnessing the powerful connection between a child and a therapy dog in a hospital can be magical.
“I’ve witnessed these visits firsthand. And I can tell you, it gives me chills just talking about it. Because they are so powerful in what is happening in that moment,” said Nancy Gee, PhD, Director of the Human-Animal Interaction Center at Virginia Commonwealth University.
She has spent decades researching the impact therapy dogs have on people, including pediatric patients.
“I’ve seen kids who are just sitting there crying. And when the dog walks in, they change, the parents, it’s as if there’s a little bit of a weight lifted off their shoulders just in that moment. And the children turn their attention to the dogs. And I’ve seen them stop crying and get down on the floor and play with the dog while they’re undergoing chemotherapy,” said Gee.
Her work has gone beyond anecdotal evidence. She’s proven the neuroscience, that something physically real is happening when a child interacts with its Dogs on Call program.
“What we’ve found is that anxiety is reduced in patients following a single Dogs on Call visit, fear is reduced by 37%, and anxiety by an additional 18%, prior to a scary procedure,” said Gee.
Gee has also studied children and dog interactions in a school setting that has shown to lower stressors and boost confidence.
The Rancho Coastal Humane Society has a reading program that allows children to read to dogs with no judgment and improve their literacy skills.
Therapy dogs are also used in San Diego County courtrooms to help children testify during difficult cases and lower stress, the same triggers that may be felt in a hospital for a child,” said Gee.
“When you look at children who interact with dogs, for example, some research has shown that children will express lower ratings of pain when they’re in the emergency room,” said Gee.
This type of healing power is needed at Rady Children’s Hospital.
“We really need the community support to make this happen,” said Alex Loker, V.P of Philanthropy at Rady Children’s Hospital.
Programs like this are funded solely through donations. Other children’s hospitals have professional medical canine programs but Rady Children’s, which is ranked one of the top 10 hospitals in the country, does not.
CBS 8 is Working FUR Kids to help pediatric patients have a more pawsitive experience and allow kids to be kids in the hospital.
“We’re so excited that CBS 8 will be championing this cause with us at Rady Children’s,” said Loker.
Gee says theoretically, history has shown that dogs can be a good dose of medicine.
“This lengthy process of domestication and selection has happened over a period of about 35,000 years, and there’s no species on the planet that’s better socialized to work to being with humans than dogs are,” said Gee.
She says that bond fulfills the four roles of the attachment theory:
“That is that they’re enjoyable, that they’re comforting, that they’re missed when absent, and they’re sought in times of distress,” said Gee.
The research shows the evidence is there, the connection between a dog and a pediatric patient is just what the doctor ordered.
“They’re, really adept at reading our emotional states and our social gestures, they can communicate with us using pretty complex cues. And they’re able to form some really complicated attachments with humans,” said Gee.
Working Fur Kids is an effort to help raise funds in collaboration with the public, to start a Resident Canine Therapy Program at Rady Children’s here in San Diego. Please consider making a monetary donation to kickstart this essential program that will help ease the pain and suffering of children who are patients at Rady Children’s Hospital, California’s largest non-profit children’s hospital.
Watch Related: Help Rady Children's launch a professional canine therapy program | Working Fur Kids (Mar 20, 2024)