We would like to thank Dr. Ross Kerr, a well published and highly respected authority on oral medicine, and professor at NYU for the use of some of his many clinical photographs which you see here. His extensive clinical experience in helping us choose which images to present to you was invaluable.
There are a wide variety of conditions exhibited in these images. You can just click on one and then manually go through the group with the arrow at the bottom to view them in a larger format. Please note, that we have included images of abnormalities that we think that people might find in their mouths. They are conditions quite capable of meeting the persistence criteria, some which have the potential over time to transform into oral cancers, but most of them are not. Why would we show you pictures of things which are not yet cancer and some which will never be cancer? Because we do not wish to try to become a diagnostician of a very complex tissue change process. Your job is to find things, it is the job of a professional to determine that what you discover is dangerous or not. Out of hundreds of things that you may come across in your mouth, we cannot teach you enough to decide that something is cancer or not. The professional community itself is more than aware that from a visual exam, many times even they cannot with certainty definitively say what something is. This means that if they, like you find it suspect, they will take a small piece of it (biopsy), and send it to an oral pathologist who will examine it under a microscope, and that person will come up with a gold standard, black and white answer as to what it is.
Most findings will likely be benign, some of those will be treatable conditions, so when treated they resolve, some will be precancers- that if allowed to persist, one day might evolve into a dangerous cancer. The bottom line is that your job is just to find things that are different, persisting, and therefore suspicious. No one can tell you from a picture on the web (outside of very late stage, well-developed advanced cancer) that something is cancer or not…. that is not the purpose of this monthly exploration of your mouth. Your job is to catch a change early, and refer yourself to a professional to have them decide it needs to be removed, treated, or monitored, or not. Finding a precancer will likely save your life. Finding the very earliest stage of something that is already a cancer, will mean that your treatment to remove it and have it no longer part of your life, will be a much less invasive and difficult process, accomplished with a high degree of success and ultimately long-term survival.