Got a medical question? Let me stretch my brain.

Originally Posted by sikk50

Ok, I'll play.

When I first moved to Chico they had these weird things called "seasons," yea we don't have those in SoCal. So naturaly the trees lose their leaves and polonate rather more dramaticly than down south. Sortly after the move I had the worst sore thoat of my life, so bad that it would wake me up at night, it lasted for a couple weeks with verying degrees of intensity. During that time I also suffered from swollen tonsils, pink eye (first time in my life) and plugged ears. My insurence didn't work up here so I went to the schools med place and she said it was allergies intensified by a nasty cold that had been going around of some sort and just gave me a script for sudifed. Well it helped but I was still displeased and drinking three cups of hot lemon tea and honey a day was rather old at this point so i went to the health clinic. There the doc said that I had a sinus infection at was looking pretty brutal and that he felt that was the cause off all of this, saying as it would max out one area it would move to another. He gave me Leviquin. It helped, but I still wasn't top notch for a week or so after the pills were gone.

Anyway regardless to this day I have wat look like little bumps on the soft tissue above my dangley ball thing in my throat. My family doctor has looked at this and asked promptly if I drink a lot of hot liquids, "why yes, about a whole pot of coffee daily." Do you drink alcohol, "well its safe to say there wont be any breweries closing while I'm around." Do you smoke, "5 cigars a week." then he says that its just an irritant because of all of these things. Now I may just not have paid that much attention to the inner dynamics of my mouth before this ordeal, but I feel fairly confident the little bumps came with that. They don't bug, no irritation, just there hanging out, rather small, about like a pin poke size.

What do you think doc?

When you say "on the soft itssue above my [uvula]", I presume you mean the soft-palate (soft part of the roof of the mouth, posterior to the hard-palate).

Well, you had me on this one, so I did a little research. At this time I will plug a little more info for the layperson (I intend on slipping this stuff in all over the place). A particularly good website for researching information for yourselves is the patient section of uptodate . com. The doctor end of this website is becoming the world leader in condensed medical information. Its my first source (then I go through many other sources as needed). Both ends are written by world experts on the topics they write.

In this case, the research didn't change what my approach would be regarding this one (it confirmed that some fears were warranted, and that no easy "better diagnosis" was immediately obvious to the specialists).

This is a case where having eyes-on is very important. Its what determines is on the differential diagnosis and what is not. But, let me tell you, when a medical student comes to me with this sentence:

"My patient is a daily cigar smoker who occassionally drinks alcohol and has noticed persistent non-painful papules to his soft-palate over [insert timeframe here...months? years?]" then the first thing that should come to my mind is cancer. In fact it is what we call a an UPO diagnosis (until proven otherwise). Now, don't freak out to much. Its probably not cancer. But, I would want to be 100% comfortable with being able to say "its not cancer" before I would be so bold. Maybe in your case having a brief look at it would make a physician comfortable that, indeed, it is not. Otherwise, a biopsy would be in order.

Keep in mind, that the majority of mouth mucosal cancers start out as "pre-cancer" lesions and stay like that for a very LONG time. Only if ignored long enough, combined with a large amount of bad-luck do they transform into cancer. A biopsy would tell you if it were pre-cancer or not, and give plenty of time to cut it all out and aim for cure.

Finally, many of these mouth/throat cancers are conditions of chronic exposure over LONG periods of time. I assume you may be fairly young (sounded like you were talking about university life, so likely you are fairly young). If that is the case, then the invincibility of youth is on your side (in that you probably haven't been exposed to daily cigar smoke for 20 years), providing you take the steps to rule it out.