Fido's No Doctor. Neither Is Whiskers.

[Guest guest]

Fido's No Doctor. Neither Is Whiskers. By HAL HERZOG

The evidence that pets can improve their owners' mental and physical health

doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Cullowhee, N.C. - A DOG or cat owner spends roughly $10,000 on the care and

feeding of his pet over its lifetime. (Dogs cost more per year, but cats make up

for it by living longer.) What does he get for this investment?

Surveys indicate that what most pet owners mainly want is companionship,

unconditional love and a play pal. In recent years, however, we have also begun

to regard pets as furry physicians and four-legged psychotherapists.

The idea that domestic animals are beneficial to human health and happiness has

been fueled by books like " The Healing Power of Pets: Harnessing the Amazing

Ability of Pets to Make and Keep People Happy and Healthy, " by the veterinarian

Marty Becker, and by news reports claiming that having a dog helps you live

longer or that swimming with dolphins can cure autism, bad backs, attention

deficit disorder and even cancer. But is there any truth to these claims?

The task of distinguishing hype from reality on this question falls to

anthrozoology, the new science of human-animal relationships. In 1980,

Friedmann, a scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, found the first

evidence that animals might provide medical benefits: a survey of 92 heart

attack victims revealed that those who had pets were nearly five times more

likely to be alive a year later than those without them.

Since then, research has shown that stroking an animal lowers blood pressure,

that AIDS patients living with pets are less depressed and that pet owners have

lower cholesterol levels, sleep more soundly, exercise more and take fewer sick

days than non-pet owners. Indeed, I have a stack of articles in my office

supporting the hypothesis that pets are healthy for us.

Unfortunately, however, I also have another stack of articles, almost as high,

showing that pets have either no long-term effects or have even adverse effects

on physical and mental health.

A 2006 survey of Americans by the Pew Research Center, for instance, reported

that living with a pet did not make people any happier. Similarly, a 2000

Australian study of mortality rates found no evidence that pet owners lived any

longer than anyone else. And last year Dutch researchers concluded that

companion animals had no effect on their owners' physical or mental well-being.

Worse, in 2006, epidemiologists in Finland reported that pet owners were more

likely than non-pet owners to suffer from sciatica, kidney disease, arthritis,

migraines, panic attacks, high blood pressure and depression.

This pattern of mixed results also holds true for the widely heralded notion

that animals can cure various physical afflictions. For example, a study of

people with chronic fatigue syndrome found that while pet owners believed that

interacting with their pets relieved their symptoms, objective analysis revealed

that they were just as tired, stressed, worried and unhappy as sufferers in a

control group who had no pets. Similarly, a clinical trial of cancer patients

undergoing radiation therapy found that interacting with therapy dogs did no

more to enhance the participants' morale than reading a book did.

As for the presumed curative powers of swimming with dolphins, researchers at

Emory University who reviewed the dolphin therapy studies concluded that every

one purporting to document positive health effects was methodologically flawed.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to disparage animal companionship; pets are

central to my life, too. But the truth is that we know little about how pets

could affect us biologically, or why a health benefit accrues to some people but

not others. Answering these questions will require the same rigorous methods

that scientists use to test the effectiveness of drugs and medical procedures.

Despite the importance of pets in our lives, researchers in the health and

behavioral sciences have, until recently, largely neglected the study of

human-animal relationships. But this is changing. In 2008, the National

Institutes of Health (in conjunction with Mars, the corporate giant whose

products include pet food) began a multimillion-dollar research initiative that

will eventually help separate fact from wishful thinking on how pets influence

human health and happiness.

No doubt, the talk in some medical circles of prescribing puppies and kittens

for the chronically ill is well intentioned. But until the research is complete,

pet lovers should probably keep taking their Lipitor and Prozac.

Hal Herzog, a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University, is the

author of " Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard To Think

Straight About Animals. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/opinion/04herzog.html