Four Minutes of Quality Time
Okay, so I’m not referring to the time it takes to read Molar Jockey confessions but you could do worse. You could have spent four minutes with me watching the traditional Annual USC Trojan Football Gift to the less fortunate. And this time, the happy celebrating recipients were the UW Huskies, losers of all their games last year (I know it’s better to give than receive but the Trojans even gifted the Bruins a few years ago. You gotta draw the line somewhere.)
So Saturday, even the most casual observer would have called my behavior into question, let alone my licensed use of oral power tools. And what can you say about a health care professional a few years over 40 bouncing around in his padded living room for three hours cussing out the television and even the crummy network that obviously never got what the “vision” in television stood for?
You’d have thought that my life was riding on the Saturday afternoon activity of a bunch of kids young enough to practically be my grandchildren if I wasn’t such a late-bloomer. It’s bad enough that I can sit here and actually confess my quality of life took a ridiculous hit.
But spending four minutes with me watching Trojan football could make you a better person, especially if you happen to be an over-achieving clinical psychologist. And spending four minutes in the dental chair could save your life.
One American an hour dies of oral cancer. Finding a precancerous oral lesion is part of a 4-minute oral cancer exam.
It’s scary enough that oral cancer is the only form of the disease that has increased in its incidence over the last 50 years. The disease has a higher mortality rate than breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and prostate cancer. While early detection brings an excellent prognosis and 5-year percentage survival rates in the 90s, the over all 5-year rate is less than 50%. And 27% of oral cancer patients actually have no history of smoking or using spit tobacco.
So the key is early detection. The disease is largely preventable. The exam takes about four minutes; it’s easy, doesn’t hurt, and is totally non-invasive. Here’s another tragic statistic: only about 50% of Americans see a dentist on a regular basis.
One technological advance that has saved numerous lives is the Oral CDx brush biopsy. We’ve used ’em since Day One. And I know I benefitted from the awesome opportunity of meeting anti-tobacco advocate and Baseball Hall of Fame announcer Joe Garagiola and later screening major and minor leaguers at Spring Training in Arizona. When you do something a few hundred times in two days even slow studies like me eventually get it.
A brush biopsy is pretty much the equivalent of an oral Pap smear. A soft brush is gently used to retrieve a sample of cells. Imaging technology can then find a few atypical cells out of hundreds of thousands. The sample is taken anywhere an unexpected soft tissue color inconsistency is observed. And size is not a factor; the smaller the lesion the more likely a favorable prognosis.
We’ve screened close to one hundred lesions and had about ten returned with atypical cells noted. All were pre-cancerous and were later removed by an oral surgeon almost the way you’d remove the world’s smallest wart.
Please share this column with family and friends and urge a dental visit and an oral cancer exam.
Four minutes of all the drama that goes with me watching Trojan football might seem like life and death but four minutes spent having an oral cancer exam could be the real deal.
For more info regarding early oral cancer detection please visit www.sopreventable.com.
