How Dogs Can Help Sick Children
A dog is man’s best friend for a reason; they tend to love uncompromisingly and without fail, and this makes them perfect companions for all sorts of individuals. Children with cancer tend to need a lot of love and support because they are going through an extremely tough time at an age where they are still very young and are not mature enough to fully understand what is happening to them and why. Cancer is a very stressful ailment and its treatments are often extremely unpleasant and cause a great deal of discomfort.
One of the primary things that children tend to have to deal with while they are struck with cancer is anxiety and stress. This is because their lives are changed completely; they are no longer able to interact with kids the way they used to before and a lot of their time is spent in the hospital where they are going to end up being given all kinds of medication. One study has found that dogs can actually really help kids that are dealing with this sort of situation. What a child needs more than anything else is understanding, a companion that would allow them to feel normal for once. Dogs are the best solution for this sort of thing for the simple reason that they are going to give them unquestioned support.
However, an important thing to keep in mind is that the dogs that these children interact with can’t just be any dogs, rather they are going to have to be special dogs that have been trained to provide emotional support. Dogs tend to be very easy to train when it comes to things like this because they are naturally empathetic creatures that want the best for everyone involved, and as a result they tend to be very good at judging when someone needs a little love and care.
An added benefit of these trained therapy dogs is that they were able to comfort not just the children that were sick but their parents as well. Parents of children that are sick with cancer tend to be nothing short of nervous wrecks, and it is easy to see why this would be the case. After all, their child might end up dying, and even if they don’t they are going to have to go through a number of different medical procedures which can often by extremely financially draining along with the obvious emotional impact. Therapy dogs can help parents feel better firstly because they are going to provide comfort to the child which would allow the parents to relax a little and secondly because they would provide significant stress relief for the parents themselves as well by easing their anxiety using their training. It is plain to see that therapy dogs are very important indeed and that they need to become the norm in medical practices, especially in cases where children are extremely sick.
