Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
December 12, 2024, 01:54:54 am

Login with username, password and session length


Members
Stats
  • Total Posts: 775436
  • Total Topics: 66593
  • Online Today: 368
  • Online Ever: 5484
  • (June 18, 2021, 11:15:29 pm)
Users Online
Users: 0
Guests: 275
Total: 275

Welcome


Welcome to the POZ Community Forums, a round-the-clock discussion area for people with HIV/AIDS, their friends/family/caregivers, and others concerned about HIV/AIDS.  Click on the links below to browse our various forums; scroll down for a glance at the most recent posts; or join in the conversation yourself by registering on the left side of this page.

Privacy Warning:  Please realize that these forums are open to all, and are fully searchable via Google and other search engines. If you are HIV positive and disclose this in our forums, then it is almost the same thing as telling the whole world (or at least the World Wide Web). If this concerns you, then do not use a username or avatar that are self-identifying in any way. We do not allow the deletion of anything you post in these forums, so think before you post.

  • The information shared in these forums, by moderators and members, is designed to complement, not replace, the relationship between an individual and his/her own physician.

  • All members of these forums are, by default, not considered to be licensed medical providers. If otherwise, users must clearly define themselves as such.

  • Forums members must behave at all times with respect and honesty. Posting guidelines, including time-out and banning policies, have been established by the moderators of these forums. Click here for “Do I Have HIV?” posting guidelines. Click here for posting guidelines pertaining to all other POZ community forums.

  • We ask all forums members to provide references for health/medical/scientific information they provide, when it is not a personal experience being discussed. Please provide hyperlinks with full URLs or full citations of published works not available via the Internet. Additionally, all forums members must post information which are true and correct to their knowledge.

  • Product advertisement—including links; banners; editorial content; and clinical trial, study or survey participation—is strictly prohibited by forums members unless permission has been secured from POZ.

To change forums navigation language settings, click here (members only), Register now

Para cambiar sus preferencias de los foros en español, haz clic aquí (sólo miembros), Regístrate ahora

Finished Reading This? You can collapse this or any other box on this page by clicking the symbol in each box.

Author Topic: The Fuzzy Science on Whether Fido Is Actually Good for You  (Read 3475 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Jim Allen

  • Administrator
  • Member
  • Posts: 23,188
  • Threads: @jim16309
    • Social Media: Threads
The Fuzzy Science on Whether Fido Is Actually Good for You
« on: July 15, 2024, 05:40:31 am »
My opinion is that if your pet makes you happy that is great for you and on the physical side if it means you get more exercise because of your pet that's not bad either, but pet ownership isn't for everyone, so please don't buy a pet because of claimed health benefits or Xmas.



Article in full: https://www.poz.com/article/fuzzy-science-whether-fido-actually-good
June 25, 2024 • By Undark and Michael Schulson

In brief:

Quote
Research suggesting that pet ownership improves health is largely funded by the pet care industry. Does that matter?

For more than a decade, in blog posts and scientific papers and public talks, the psychologist Hal Herzog has questioned whether owning pets makes people happier and healthier.

It is a lonely quest, convincing people that puppies and kittens may not actually be terrific for their physical and mental health. “When I talk to people about this,” Herzog recently said, “nobody believes me.” A prominent professor at a major public university once described him as “a super curmudgeon” who is, in effect, “trying to prove that apple pie causes cancer.”

Herzog argues, the scientific evidence that pets can consistently make people healthier is, at best, inconclusive — and, at worst, has been used to mislead the American public.

Few, if any, experts say Herzog is exactly wrong — at least about the science. Over the past 30 or so years, researchers have published hundreds of studies exploring a link between pet ownership and a range of hypothesized benefits, including improved heart health, longer lifespans, and lower rates of anxiety and depression.

The results have been mixed. Studies often fail to find any robust link between pets and human well-being; some even find evidence of harms. In many cases, the studies simply can’t determine whether pets cause the observed effect or are simply correlated with it

The pet care industry has invested millions of dollars in human-animal interaction research, mostly since the late 2000s. Feel-good findings have been trumpeted by industry press releases and, in turn, dominated news coverage, with headlines like “How Dogs Help Us Lead Longer, Healthier Lives.”

At times, industry figures have even framed pet ownership as a kind of public health intervention. “Everybody should quit smoking. Everybody should go to the gym. Everybody should eat more fruits and vegetables. And everyone should own a pet,” said Steven Feldman, president of the industry-funded Human Animal Bond Research Institute, in a 2015 podcast interview.

The problem with that kind of argument, Herzog and other experts say, is that it gets out ahead of the evidence (and that not every person is equipped to care for a pet). “Most studies,” said Herzog, “do not show the pattern of results that the pet products industry claims."

“What happens is we try to compare people with pets, to people without pets, and then we say, ‘People with pets have X, Y, and Z differences.’ It actually is a really invalid way of approaching the research question,” said Kerri Rodriguez, who directs the Human-Animal Bond Lab at the University of Arizona. A study finding that cat owners are more likely to be depressed, for example, may be picking up on a real connection. But it could just be that people already experiencing depression are likelier to get cats.

Herzog agrees that having a pet can have real benefits. At the end of a recent conversation, he reflected on his cat, Tilly, who died in 2022. She used to watch TV with him in the evenings, and she would curl up on a rocking chair in his basement office while he worked. The benefits of their relationship, Herzog said, were real but perhaps hard to measure — among the intangible qualities that are difficult to capture on research surveys.

"If you’d asked me, ‘Did Tilly improve the quality of your life?’ I’d say absolutely,” he said. “My health? Nah.”

HIV 101 - Everything you need to know
HIV 101
Read more about Testing here:
HIV Testing
Read about Treatment-as-Prevention (TasP) here:
HIV TasP
You can read about HIV prevention here:
HIV prevention
Read about PEP and PrEP here
PEP and PrEP

My Instagram
Threads

Offline Tonny2

  • Member
  • Posts: 3,203
Re: The Fuzzy Science on Whether Fido Is Actually Good for You
« Reply #1 on: July 16, 2024, 10:19:28 am »



              ojo.           Hello there!… Well, before my Fido, I didn’t exercise too much. I went from 500 steps a day to around 10,000 steps a day after I got my fighter Fido (R.I.P.). I still have Fido 2 and still walking a lot when the weather allows it, it’s been pretty hot hearing high. Mentally speaking, Fido helps me when I feel Anxious. And I prefer dogs because every time I get home, they are happy to see me while cats. They don’t give a damn when I get home. In Mexico, I used to have two cats and two dogs…as Jim said, pets are not for everyone,  they need attention and love…humble opinion

Offline leatherman

  • Global Moderator
  • Member
  • Posts: 8,836
  • Google and HIV meds are Your Friends
Re: The Fuzzy Science on Whether Fido Is Actually Good for You
« Reply #2 on: July 16, 2024, 08:22:25 pm »
"If you’d asked me, ‘Did Tilly improve the quality of your life?’ I’d say absolutely,” he said. “My health? Nah.”
Never disparage optimism.  ;) :D

While "quality of life", and even "health", can be subjective, an improved quality of life results in happiness which often results in improved health. "Improved" is subjective too. However, happier people tend to have less stress resulting in fewer heart issues. Happier people are more likely to take their medications, exercise, and to try to stay healthier.

Scientifically, a lot more data will have to be collected to ever actually know if having a pet results in better health. There are just so many factors. Does the person have the temperament, time, and resources to properly care for the pet? Does the pet itself have the right temperament to match with it's owner? Just those four factors seem so few; but each of those has literally a whole range of possibilities and combination of possibilities.



For myself, twice after being surviving PCP, I left the hospital to go home to care for my dogs. I mean, a pack of 7 dogs was just too much responsibility to leave to someone else. (I forgive Randy for leaving me behind with the pack because his being infected two years before me was the death sentence he had no chance to escape.) Leaving the hospital against medical advice, I knew that I was either going to die at home or was going to live. I struggled every day to to care for them, and little by little, it got easier as I regained my health.

I've outlived that pack of dogs and then had a second pack with four dogs. Now my husband and I had our own pack of 2 dogs. I love my doggos; they love me; and my quality of life and my health are both greatly improved by all that love.
leatherman (aka Michael)

We were standing all alone
You were leaning in to speak to me
Acting like a mover shaker
Dancing to Madonna then you kissed me
And I think about it all the time
- Darren Hayes, "Chained to You"

 


Terms of Membership for these forums
 

© 2024 Smart + Strong. All Rights Reserved.   terms of use and your privacy
Smart + Strong® is a registered trademark of CDM Publishing, LLC.