Ask Dr. Goodjohn: General & Cosmetic Dentist
April 9, 2009 by admin
Filed under Business Highlights
“More than 34,000 Americans will be diagnosed with oral or pharyngeal cancer this year,” says the website of the Oral Cancer Foundation. “It will cause over 8,000 deaths.”
Tannaz Goodjohn helps to fight it. A graduate of UCLA’s dental school, she is the founder of Dental Boutique, a dental practice with an emphasis in aesthetic, reconstructive and implant dentistry. Beverly Hills Times recently contacted her about oral cancer.
Beverly Hills Times: Who is at risk for oral cancer?
Dr. Goodjohn: Essentially everyone is!
The disease is growing fast. In recent years, the American Cancer Society has estimated a 5.5% annual increase in new cases of oral cancer and a 1.5% increase in deaths associated with it.
BHT: How would I know if I’ll get it?
Dr. Goodjohn: Are you sexually active? The human papilloma virus (HPV), a sexually-transmitted infection prevalent in young adults, plays a role in more than 20% of oral cancer cases.
Patients age 40 and up with lifestyle risk factors such as alcohol consumption and/or tobacco use and patients with a family history of oral cancer are at highest risk for developing the disease.
You may not even know that you have oral cancer. Twenty-five percent of oral cancers occur in people who do not smoke or have any other lifestyle risk factors.
BHT: How can I find out if I’ve got it?
Dr. Goodjohn: At my office, we make it our standard of care to perform a regular visual oral examination, followed by a Vizilite Plus screening. The Vizilite Plus technology identifies cancerous and precancerous abnormalities. It takes minutes to do, and no pain is involved. That’s it! Recommended by the American Cancer Society, this screening helps detect oral cancer early.
I’m currently offering two specials to make it even easier: An Oral Exam, Healthy mouth cleaning and full mouth radiographs (in the absence of gum disease) for $99, and the Oral Cancer Screening using ViziLite Plus for $49.
And early detection is key. Oral cancer is one of the most curable diseases if caught early. More than 90% of treatments for oral cancer are successful. To say it quite simply, early detection can save your life!
Steve on Thu, 9th Apr 2009 6:11 pm
Kudos for being one of the less than 30% of dentists in the US that actually take the time to screen their patients… yes, I know the JADA put an article out that said that more tan 90% do, but you know they only just ASKED/surveyed a bunch of dentists THAT KNOW THAT THEY SHOULD BE DOING IT, if the do it… JADA is not know for its peer reviewed science.
Having said that, I wish you would consider another adjunctive device. Vizilite is 2% acetic acid (which if you would like to save some money, you can buy in the grocery store as Heinz white vinegar. Go to UCLA or USC and see what the oral medicine specialist brings out from under the counter… Heinz. Then they give you a light made by Omini-Glo whose main market is selling them to kids at rave parties and campers, that has nothing special about it. No special wave length of light, nada. They then try to convince you (dentists) that chemiluminesence has something to do with oral cancer screening, but it is actually just the process of producing light by mixing two chemicals together. (Google it) Nothing to do with what is going on in the tissue at all. A competing product (MicroLux) does the same thing with electricity and has the same results. I’m not advocating for that product either, as I find the science just as weak, but wanted to make the point about the light source.
So what does all this do? The vinegar dessicates the tissue and removes all the mucopolysaccharides, and other coatings on the tissues that might cause light reflections and confuse/confound what you are looking for. After all the device only finds white lesions (not the most dangerous of the ones that move onto become cancer) and a white reflection needs to be eliminated to get a good look see. (Only 25% of all leucoplakias proceed to cancer, erythroplakias are way more dangerous.) GYN’s have done this for years with vinegar douches… since about 1947. They then looked at the cervix, with a vaginal speculum (a flashlight on a stick) and did really good exams. Actually they brought the death rate down about 71% over 10 years (48-58). No new science, no new treatments….. just early detection. And guess what, cervical cancer and 85% of all oral cancers are the same disease SCC. Screening works. It just take trained eyes and fingers, combined with knowledge of what to look for, which you already have.
The future of oral cancer screening is proteomics and genomics via salivary diagnostics (Wong et al UCLA), combined with tissue fluorescence which has about 60 million dollars in NIH money behind the science (there is only one product which uses this on the market today VELscope which I am also not advocating for) is nothing like tissue reflectance (Visilite), after protein and RNA markers are identified.
Vizilite is dying, the parent company is being delisted from the stock exchange, (it’s now about a dime a share) and their own press releases say they may not have the ability to stay viable over the next 12 months. The science just isn’t there. The marketplace is beginning to understand this.
So thank you for doing screenings, thanks for being part of the solution. Ditch the vinegar, you can still charge for the screening without wasting your money on a worthless device that your patients hate the taste of, and doesn’t bring much to the party.