Rather than answer all the people individually that have written me in the last month about my seeming disappearance from the boards, (and those postings of mine that ramble on and on), I thought I would briefly tell everyone what is taking me away from the boards so much. OCF is, as many of you know, much more than this web site. I wish I could say we are a huge group of people fighting for all of you, but it is at this time essentially just me tilting at windmills, or sometimes I feel spitting into the wind. In the last couple of months, some of the things that have taken me away are the following:

I met with the powers that be at the ADA in Chicago. I am trying to get them to do several things. One is get their population of 100,000 dentists off their rear ends and do more screenings, if for no other reason than it is going to protect them from getting those collective asses sued for failure to diagnose, or failure to meet standards of care. This year I have testified in two legal suits against doctors who watched and waited till it was way too late, and I am in the docket to do another case this summer. (Hell hath no fury like an oral cancer survivor who had his cancer missed by his doctors.) While this is not a vendetta, it is important work. Unfortunately all the cases so far have settled out of court with permanent gag orders on them, and I haven't been able to use the cases as examples to take to the dental community. The insurance companies know they cannot win these suits, and they ALWAYS want them out of the public eye as part of the settlement. Remember that the ADA's charter is to take care of their members, not the public, (though their PR machine would have you believe otherwise) and as that type of professional society, they have their own agenda. But they can drive many things in their own self-interest that would help, and the other issue that I am pushing them towards is mandatory oral cancer CE (continuing education credits which every doctor has to have each year to keep their license) education at the state licensing board level. I have spent much time lobbying state boards, (very time consuming) but a real push by the ADA would make the difference in all these individual entities desire to act. The last time that we had mandatory CE courses here in CA for instance, was at the beginning of the AIDS crisis when blood borne issues were important in dental offices - where at the time rubber gloves were not used everywhere, and not every office had switched completely from cold sterilization to autoclaves. This is an ongoing battle with an organization (the ADA) that surprisingly has a very poor history of being involved in oral cancer. After three years of my irritating them and threatening to take the story out in a public venue, that is changing. But it is slow. Getting them to sponsor any kind of national initiative that costs money is out of the question for these guys. Leadership for that will have to come from elsewhere