Oral cancer kills one person in America every hour of every day, 24-7-365. Of those newly diagnosed today, about half will be alive in 5 years. Even surviving this disease will mean that you endured brutal treatments, and leave you with life-long issues that will compromise your quality of life. So this site was designed to help you avoid this disease when possible, and also teach you to recognize and find early symptoms of it, so you might then self-refer to a dentist or other professional to have suspicious things evaluated. Caught early, every negative part of this; from treatments to ultimate outcome, are lessened in severity.
You’ve taken the first step to beating oral cancer by being here on the “Check Your Mouth™” website. Many people have never even heard of oral cancers, let alone how deadly they are. Recently your attention may have been brought to it because a famous person was diagnosed and was in the news. Like many things, our natural tendency is to think these kinds of things would never apply to us, especially if we are non-tobacco users. Well think again….the fastest growing cause of back of the mouth cancers, which the incidence of is increasing rapidly in our population, is a common virus. A virus so common that most adults will have an infection with it in their lifetime. The CDC says that virtually all Americans will be exposed to it in their early sexual encounters. Luckily only a very small number of Americans have an immune system that doesn’t recognize the virus as a threat, and in that small percentage of the population decades later it prospers into a cancer. But there is no way to know if your immune system will protect you or not…. until it is too late. The traditional risk factors of tobacco use in all its forms, and high alcohol consumption also put you at risk for oral cancer. Because we have no national screening policy for oral cancer, it is typically found in the later stages, which has a direct impact on the dismal survival rate.
Clearly, the prudent thing to do is to engage in a routine self-exam, which we are going to show you how to do easily in about 5-10 minutes once a month.
