greetings all,
i am 26 and have recently been diagnosed with stage 3 oral cancer. in exactly one month i will undergo surgery to remove half of my tongue and most of the lymph nodes in my neck. i am very frustrated about this because the cause of my cancer most likely was the braces i had removed 7 months ago. the braces caused a constant injury to my tongue that both my orthdontist and dentist ignored for 3 years. does the professional community get trained to look for oral cancer, or was it ignored in my case because i was a young non-tabacco and alcohol user? if anyone else had a similar situation, please respond.
thanks

More and more non-smokers who are young are getting oral cancer. I hear this anecdotally from doctors and institutions who are treating people all around the country. I think that your blaming your braces and orthodontist for your condition is misplaced blame. There is no scientific peer reviewed literature that conclusively ties long term trauma to oral cancer. You see this listed occasionally on some sites as a cause, but there is no evidence to back it up. If braces and the trauma and irritation that they induce were the causative factor in oral cancers, you would see a lot of this in that particular population of individuals that wear braces. You do not see this. Right now the important thing is to get through treatments and get cancer out of the picture. When the dust settles, you can look for cause. I too was a relatively young (by oral cancer standards) person who never used tobacco who got oral cancer. It turns out that both my wife and I are HPV 16/18 positive, and I believe this is the cause in my case and in many other non-smoker

thanks for the information about the virus. i had never heard of that before. i'll have to get myself tested.
the reason why i blame the braces is because the exact site of the wound is where the cancer developed. my braces literally cut a huge chunk out of my tongue and continued to irritate that site through the entire 3 years i had them. when it started to heal over, it became a textbook precancerous leasion......which i foolishly believed to be scar tissue. for 3 years, i had the textbook precancerous areas on my tongue and no one said anything about it. it was those exact areas that the oral pathogist biopsied and those were the areas that became cancerous.
the only reason i dwell on the braces issue is because i went to a clinic at a university for them. it is an education setting, and they were definitely not educating the students properly. my student, as well as her supervising orthodontists and the dentists i saw ignored something that shouldn't have been overlooked.
as a phd student in pathology, i couldn't believe what happened. if i had any clue that it could be cancer, i would have gotten my text books out sooner and been more aggressive with my dentist and orthodontist.
my goal is to take my story to the clinics and educate them. the oral pathologist i saw is going to use me as a case study to try and prevent this from happening again. education is the key to prevention, and my case shows that there was a break down in the educational system.
(p.s. i know i am going to kick this cancer's butt....that's why i'm crusading about this possible braces issue)