It may be many things. But you know the drill here. If it has persisted this long I would want a piece of it under a microscope and a board certified pathologist to tell me EXACTLY what was going on with those cells.

If it is chronic irritation that will be revealed If it is a non healing would for some other reason then methodologies to induce healing should be instituted. I don't even want to use the recurrence word, but if it is something bad, of course you want to know as early as possible.

An eyeball exam is only as good as the experience of the person doing it, and even then it is certainly no absolute. The VELscope is a good device, but it is not specific for oral cancer. That it showed up white seems odd to me. Green is normal, dark is abnormal according to the lecturers and literature that I have read and images that I have seen. No one has said anything about white. The device is new to the market, and I have talked to tons of doctors that do not know how to interpret what it is showing them. It finds; trauma, cancer, fungal infections, bacterial and viral infections, and other oddities like Lichen Planus, heavily vascularized areas, heavily keritanized areas and more. It is a discovery device not a diagnostic device. It finds stuff and the clinician has to then determine what it has found.

In your shoes I would get a small biopsy, and I would really like you to see an oral medicine specialist if it turns out not to be cancer. They are usually found at dental schools, (there are only a few in private practice in the whole country) and they know the oddities of the zillion different things that go funny in your mouth better than most others.