We ran an article on Diabetes News Hound about Max, a service dog that helps his 14-year old master detect low and high blood sugars. This sounds like such a great idea. I was wondering if anyone on this forum has a service dog that is trained to help them manage their diabetes.
You can check out the full article about Max here.
I am the proud owner of a fully-certified service dog named Rae. She is from the Concord, California based organization Dogs4Diabetics and I cannot imagine life without her. She is disturbingly accurate and perfectly behaved…I adore her. My HA1C has improved significantly since I got her because I can now attempt tight control without worrying about severe lows while sleeping, driving, or taking midterms. She’s amazing. However, it took many years to get her and I to the point where we had a functional, working interaction. She did not start out perfect, and we were not allowed to graduate from the program until our accuracy ratings were near 100%. But with a lot of time and energy, we did it, and now my life will never be the same - but in a good way.
I’d love to talk to any of you about this. I know it’s a hot topic and there are a lot of questions out there.
I’m happy to hear of your success. Are candidates allowed to have other dogs at home or should a diabetic-trained dog be the only dog in a household? I looked into dogs4diabetics and what they do is amazing. The required commitment is substantial but necessary I guess. I’ve read about other organizations having problems producing reliable dogs so I guess it really does require a lot of training.
