Sherrone -
Your quote from your ENT says one thing very clear that that doctor is at least 9 years behind what we know about this disease. The nail was definitively put in the coffin of HPV16 being an independent and unique etiology for posterior of the mouth oral cancer 2001. Peer reviewed published and confirmed since then by multiple other state of the art institutions and researchers. Given that off the mark "gut" feel about anything that is biologically going on with you, I would not put a lot of faith in that doctor's opinion. More so, why is the ENT not doing a conventional biopsy? They are trained to, and doing brush cytology instead makes me wonder as well.
As to the rarity of this situation, I will offer you the most recent news release on this in the OCF news site, which quotes Dr. Marshall Posner of Dana Farber Cancer Center, someone that I personally chose as an individual to send a dying friend to for a Hail Mary procedure (you can see the level of trust at play in his knowledge) as saying that the HPV16 oral cancer situation is now, in his mind, "epidemic" (his choice of words) at about 20,000 oral cancers in the US in 2010. That would be about 48% of all cases. I think the horse is way out of the barn on oral cancers and
HPV being rare.
As to the comments on intensity, you can be thorough, urgent, but in order to keep things in perspective for any mental well being, proportionate to the facts on the ground. Leave that realm, and the people you need to understand and believe in you (to make good clinical decisions) start to discount things as emotion rather than biology, and feel that the patient may be overblowing the facts.
