After an informed public that is knowledgeable about the risk factors for oral cancer, the dental community is the first line of defense in early detection of the disease. Including both generalists and specialists, there are over 100,000 dentists in the US, each one seeing between 8 and 15 patients per day. If you include those patients who come to a practice and see someone other than the dentist, such as the hygienist, the number of patient visits is significantly higher. The American Dental Association states that 60% of the US population sees a dentist every year. Just doing “opportunistic” cancer screenings of the existing patient population which visits a dental office every day, would yield tens of thousands of opportunities to catch oral cancer in its early stages. One of our goals is to initiate an effort within the dental community to aggressively screen all of the patients who visit their practices. At the same time, we are launching a public awareness campaign. This campaign is intended to drive public awareness of oral cancer and to instill in the public’s mind the need for an annual screening for this disease. To augment the efforts of professionals, we are launching a “Check Your Mouth” campaign in January 2018 which will encourage people to, between dental visits at home on a monthly basis, do a self-examination of their mouths looking for things which are new, appear abnormal, and are persisting. This will then lead to self-referral to a dental of a medical practitioner for evaluation of the suspect area and definitive diagnosis of what it is. A dedicated website www.checkyourmouth.org has been established that has a simple how-to video on self-screening to get everyone started easily. The idea of self-examination is not new, and in other cancers that lend themselves to this idea such a melanoma and breast cancer, the idea of at-home examinations has had huge benefits. O
