The rewards of having a pet

[Iamme]

"I consider getting a pet to be one of the easiest and most rewarding ways of living a longer, healthier life"-Dr. Edward Creagen, Mayo Clinic cancer specialist

From a lengthy newspaper article yesterday, he went on to cite actual patients that went into remission and/or were cured, which the only explanation is, ruling out other factors, was by them having and loving a pet. (He was the guy in charge of that study about anonymous prayers helping patients. LOL---just kidding)

I will try to remember to bring in the article so I can make some more quotes from it.

In the same PETS section of our paper was this headline: "Obscure Cuban dogs represent fastest-growing registered breed in the country" The Havanese dog. These cute little white ankle-biters.

[geni]

I belive that it has been shown that owning a pet lowers the stress levels of the owners. I would suspect this acounts for most of the observed health inprovements anthough clearly in some cases the "having something to live for" factor is important.

[BillyJoe]

I'm pretty sure that it has never been conclusively proven that reducing stress reduces your chance of getting cancer or that it increases survival once you have cancer.

[Psi Baba]

Originally posted by BillyJoe
I'm pretty sure that it has never been conclusively proven that reducing stress reduces your chance of getting cancer or that it increases survival once you have cancer.
No, but stress has certainly been shown to exacerbate various health afflictions, so eliminating or reducing stress can only be a good thing.

[Iamme]

Technically, I should be quite ill. I am a very stressed-out, high strung person. Very extremely so, a matter of fact. In fact...I plan on calling 1-800-anxiety to get my free tape on stress from Lucinda Bassert (from the Midwest Center for Anxiety and stress...panic attacks, etc.). They say it is the thinking type people who suffer from such malodies.

I am CONSTANTLY thinking, and trying to be careful of this and that in my line of work. I laugh when I hear it said that we only use 10% of our brains. Ha! I would stroke-out if I did any more thinking! You outta see the volumes of writings and drawing I have at my house!(I lay in bed and think of such stuff as: "Why would a God make us to have to reproduce, so that we have kids, who we have to teach to be able to do what we already learned to do? Why not just keep the people already born, alive, so that there would be no wasted time in having to re-teach the same crap all over again...generation after generation")

Anyway. I don't have any disease that I Know of. Yet, I know my blood pressure averages high (maybe this has BENEFITS) that they haven't realized yet!:D . Go read my new thread I posted about colds and flu.

[BillyJoe]

Originally posted by Psi Baba
No, but stress has certainly been shown to exacerbate various health afflictions, so eliminating or reducing stress can only be a good thing. Yes, I'm not denying that.