William, Like Chuck, I am a ways out from treatment (3 years) and I am still noticing improvement in my saliva. In fact, I would say there's been a very noticable improvement just in the last 6 months. I take salagen and I do find it helps--you may not have given it a long enough time. But it tends to give me bursts of saliva for a couple of hours after then I go back to being dry. In the last 6 months, the bursts have actually felt like a little too much--I sometimes almost drool (ick) so now I'm thinking about decreasing the dose I take.

I do have to drink a lot of water when I "eat" and I put that in quotes because most of what I eat are thick soups, yogurt, pastina with sauce and other liquids. Unless the liquid is thin, I have to rinse with water even with soup but that's because I have a lot of small webbed scars in my cheeks from the radiation and I think things kind of get lodged in between the scar tissue.

I WISH I could do serious aerobic exercise without stopping for water or biotene spray but even that is slowly getting better. I used to get so dry that the minute things got aerobic at all my tongue would be sticking to my teeth. Now I can go for a few minutes (between 5 and 10) at a moderately aerobic level before that happens.

There was a poster here, CathyG, who I have not seen lately, but she was 15 or 16 years post-radiation and regularly took salagen and said she was still having improvements in her saliva years and years after.

So have hope--but have patience!

Nelie