Medical delivers new light on the death predicting cat
SYDNEY (Reuters) – When doctors and officials realized that a cat who lives in a nursing home in America could feel when someone was going to die, the cat “Oscar” was seen as an angel of death on all fours or a furry parka.
Dr. David Dosa, who spread the news about the ability of an Oscar in a publication in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007, said he never intended to show the cat as dark or upon arrival at a bed had a negative view .
Dosa said he hopes his new book, “Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat”, provide a more favorable view of the feline and serve as a helpful book for those with a loved one suffering from a terminal illness.
“After the article in the New England Journal has the feeling that if Oscar is in your bed, you’re dead, but really did not see what happened to their relatives,” said Dosa, assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.
“I wanted to write a book that went beyond the specifics of Oscar, tell why it is important for family members and specialists who have been with him at the end of his life,” he said.
Dosa said Oscar’s story is fascinating on many levels.
Oscar was adopted as a child from a shelter cat to be trained as a therapy in the nursing home Steere and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, which serves people with severe dementia and in the final stages of disease.
When Oscar was about six months, staff noticed that he began to sleep with patients who were near death.
So far it has accurately predicted some 50 deaths.
Dosa recalls an opportunity where staff were convinced of the imminent death of a patient, but Oscar refused to sit with them, preferring to another inmate’s bed in the ward. Oscar was right, the person who sat died first, surprising nurses and doctors.
The doctor said there was no evidence to explain the capabilities of Oscar, but he believes that perhaps the cat responds to a pheromone or odor that humans simply do not recognize.
Dosa said his main interest is not ramble on about the capabilities of the cat, but to use Oscar to tell a story about terminal illnesses, which are their primary workspace.
“There is much to tell about what Oscar does, but much to say on a human level about what the family pass at the end of life, when struggling with a loved one in a nursing or advanced dementia,” he said.
“Perhaps the book is a little more accessible because there’s a cat in it. We really know very little about nursing homes and try to dispel the myth that they are horrible factories where people go to die,” he said.
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