pulitzer, I think you need a second opinion from a multidisciplinary cancer center head and neck professional. I think you need that not based on anything that the HPV test tells you, because, it will not help discover an infection that is significantly below the surface, but because of your verbal complaint ( that a good doctor should pick up on in an oral history and symptomology taking).

The early finds that we are making are based on things far away from dna tests. The patient complains of difficulty in swallowing, a hard, painless, fixated node is found in the neck, when looking at the trigome (the shape formed by the two tonsillar pillars and the base of the tongue) it is not symmetrical (very indicative of tonsillar cancers). These require an informed professional screener that is both listening (and asking the right questions) and looking, combined with an aware public that knows the early signs and symptoms that are mostly painless, so they can self-discover and get in for proper exams early in the disease process.

That is the mantra that OCF has been on for more than a decade. We have been at the leading edge of this call to action, and had we had any significant funding a decade ago, this would have been in the public's awareness sooner, and would have had more involved and knowledgable professionals on board long before now. The data was there. We have helped pay to get the science done. Its distribution to both medicine, dentistry, and the public, championed by a very small non-profit (OCF) took far too long, though we have given it our best given our limited resources both human and financial.

I can remember standing in the office of a top dog at the NIH in 2001 begging for someone to pay attention, in the same year talking to a top epidemiologist at MDACC who had national visibility to buy into the paper published in 2000 about HPV, arguing with the top oral cancer person at the CDC in 2002 when I sat on their oral cancer task force, and many more such frustrating experiences that yielded little more than condescending answers. Now that many high end institutions and researchers and other bigger non-profits are finally "getting it", OCF's part in all this is largely forgotten.

But not by the primary researcher that I am proud we helped start on her path, Dr. Maura Gillison, who is today considered the most published and knowledgable person about all this in the US. We are still partnered with her again in 2012 in a clinical trial on treatments for HPV+ oral cancers.

You do what you can with what you have. Sometimes that is just not enough. It is still a daily source of frustration, that there are dentists and ENT's out there that are oblivious to the fact that HPV16 is a huge problem in the oral cancer issue. Doctors that are years out of date on what they know, and therefore how involved they are in screening, or actually involved in the discovery of something at an early stage. Somedays, you just want to slit your wrists when considering the resistance to change in our dental and medical world.