Mouth Cancer Action Month

Here’s an article from my most recent Ezine, about Mouth Cancer Awareness Month.

Please read it in conjunction with my blogpost on the cause of Oral Cancers that I wrote in August last year.

…….On my first full afternoon, tiring of shopping in The Mall and dreading spending any more time than I needed in the 115F desert heat, I took refuge in the multiplex. I chose the new Michael Douglas movie, Wall Street 2, Money Never Sleeps. It’s not a great film (I am a poor film critic usually managing to find some small thing to redeem even the biggest turkey) but Douglas does give a good performance reprising his role as Gordon Gekko, the cigar-smoking financier. The fine Havana cigars are quite a change from the packs of cigarettes that the actor used to consume when a younger man.

As in the first Wall Street film he gets to give a speech about money and greed, I was fascinated, staring at the huge screen, whether I could make out any external sign of the advanced throat tumour that would soon leave the actor devastated by chemotherapy and fighting for his life. His illness being reason that his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones had to leave her native Wales after welcoming the visitors for the Ryder Cup to return to his bedside in New York a couple of days earlier.

November is Mouth Cancer Actions Month; organised by the BDHF and supported by Denplan – some revealing statistics have been published.

•    1 person in 10 has never heard of throat cancer – more awareness predictably being in the over the age of 50.
•    An increasing number of young people are being diagnosed with the disease.
•    It is responsible for 1 death every 5 hours in the UK alone.
•    It kills more people than testicular and ovarian cancer combined.
•    The rates of mouth cancer have increased by 40% during the past decade.
•    There has been an increase in 10% over last year’s figures to 6,000 new cases a year.

Dentistry is primarily associated with quality of life and rarely with life and death. People survive without teeth – although I would not want to be one of them. Mouth cancer is devastating in treatment and consequence.

Sadly it seems there are still some dentists who do not routinely examine their patients for early signs of the disease inside the mouth and fail to examine the areas outside the mouth for lumps and bumps.
So:
•    Tell your patients what you’re looking for
•    Tell them what signs and symptoms are so that they become aware and can share what they know
•    Tell them how many people die of the disease
•    Tell them what the risk factors are
•    Tell them that’s why it’s important to have a regular screening as part of their routine recall
•    Tell them “if in doubt….get checked out”

Why not?
•    Tell your local media all about Oral Cancer Month,
•    Contact your local GMPs to remind them what they should be looking out for,
•    Spend a staff meeting talking about the subject

Isn’t this very least you can do?