Those of you who have been around here for awhile know that I am a big fan of TED.com If you are not aware of what it is, do yourself a favor and a couple times a week look at a couple of less than 10 minute videos there, they will inform, enlighten, and change the way you think about things. For new people to TED, a couple of random ones to start with might be these:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html

http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/12/jill_bolte_tayl/

Anyway, an important discovery regarding head and neck cancers, and recognizing a new way of seeing that they are actually there, when conventional imaging doesn't do the job, was on a regional TED seminar. The presentation is not up to TED standards itself, but the information is really game changing, and something that we all need to consider asking for when we have symptoms that we know are dangerous but scans do not find exactly where the problem is.

This has to do with the manner in which cancer can travel from location to location, in a way which we are not paying enough attention to - perineural invasion. We all know about circulatory and lymph system spread of the disease, but this is a mechanism that there is now a very simple way to discover� by scanning it differently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVVDHZr7erk&feature=share