I'm scheduled for surgery. I have been suffering from moderate mouth discomfort for several years and have had several biopsies, all of them negative. The symptoms that I was was referred to a surgeon for did not get worse but also did not go away. Finally I was referred to a advanced specialist who told me that the only way we could be sure that the lesion was not cancer was to remove all the questionable tissue and put it all under the microscope.
The point of this post is that from the patient's point of view, biopsies are useless. A positive biopsy tells the surgeon that there is a cancer. That helps him justify surgery. But a negative one does not tell the patient that he is cancer free. It just tells him that the little snip of tissue that they took out does not have cancer cells. Not that the patient does not have cancer, just that the biopsy missed it.
Biopsy is neither painless nor free. If your doctor suggests that you need to have one you owe it to yourself to at least ask what the benefit of the procedure is to you. I am having the the invasive surgery, that I feared from the onset, in spite of a trail of negative biopsies. I would have been better served to have had the invasive surgery five years ago when I first sought treatment.
The point of this post is that from the patient's point of view, biopsies are useless. A positive biopsy tells the surgeon that there is a cancer. That helps him justify surgery. But a negative one does not tell the patient that he is cancer free. It just tells him that the little snip of tissue that they took out does not have cancer cells. Not that the patient does not have cancer, just that the biopsy missed it.
Biopsy is neither painless nor free. If your doctor suggests that you need to have one you owe it to yourself to at least ask what the benefit of the procedure is to you. I am having the the invasive surgery, that I feared from the onset, in spite of a trail of negative biopsies. I would have been better served to have had the invasive surgery five years ago when I first sought treatment.
