Blog

  • Training My Own PTSD Service Dog

    A Little Background About me My name is Steven and I am 54. I have multiple physiological and psychological issues and have been on disability since 1994. I have had anxiety/panic and depression issues throughout my life. I have had various diagnoses depending on the doctor at the time, but they more or less followed the same theme. As time went by, I would go through periods where I did fairly well and times when I was affected and quite limited by these issues. My overall trend though was getting progressively worse where I was avoiding things that caused me to have anxiety and panic attacks. That worked well for…

  • Diabetic Alert Service Dogs & Diabetes

    November is National Diabetes Month and I wanted to take this opportunity to raise public awareness by talking a bit about what diabetes is and how service dogs can play an important role. WHAT IS DIABETES? There are different types of diabetes. They are designated as Type 1 (insulant-dependent diabetes or juvenile-onset diabetes) and accounts for about 5% of all diabetes cases. Type 2 (non-insulant-dependent diabetes mellitus or adult-onset diabetes) which accounts for the majority of all diabetes cases covering 90%-95% of all cases. Its distinction is when your body produces insulin, but either doesn’t make enough or what it does make isn’t used well by your body which causes a buildup of sugar in…

  • Diabetic Alert Dogs Better Than Tech Tools

    With type 1 diabetes there is the endless monitoring of blood sugar levels, even at night, which can leave you sleep-deprived and add to an already stressful existence.  Service dogs can be trained to sniff out unhealthy blood sugar levels in humans — and alert them 20 minutes before a glucose monitoring system can.  This is very important because low blood sugar can result in a coma; high blood sugar over an extended period of time can lead to kidney, liver, eye damage or stroke. If proper measures are not taken, high and low blood glucose levels can lead to death. Amazingly, service dogs can be trained to alert diabetics before they are in serious danger. Humans have…