Author Topic: Curt Schilling Reveals He Was Diagnosed With Mouth Cancer in February, Believes Chewing Tobacco Was the Cause  (Read 723 times)

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Offline Machiavelli

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Steve Silva
The Boston Globe
August 20, 2014

Quote
Curt Schilling, the former Red Sox pitcher and ESPN analyst, announced today during the WEEI/NESN Jimmy Fund Radio Telethon that he was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma -- which is cancer in the mouth -- in February.

"This all came about from a dog bite," Schilling said. "I got bitten by a dog and I had some damage to my finger and I went to see a doctor, and the day that I went to see the doctor, I was driving and I went to rub my neck and I felt a lump on the left side of my neck. And I knew immediately it wasn't normal. So there happened to be an ENT [Ear, Nose, and Throat] right next door to the hand doctor, and I thought what the heck, let me just stop in and see and so I waited in the office and went in there and they did the biopsy, and two days later, they diagnosed me with squamous cell carcinoma.
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Offline aligncare

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Cancers can be baffling. From emedicinehealth.com:

"Many people who have no risk factors (ie., tobacco, alcohol, sun exposure, age, sex) develop mouth and throat cancer. Conversely, many people with several risk factors do not."

I guess that bit of uncertainty is what keeps the tobacco industry alive in the face of 40-years of mounting evidence of the dangers of tobacco use.

Online GourmetDan

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I guess that bit of uncertainty is what keeps the tobacco industry alive in the face of 40-years of mounting evidence of the dangers of tobacco use.

Mustn't allow people to engage in behaviors that could be bad for them.  No, no, no...

There's more money in it if'n it's illegal...


"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left." - Ecclesiastes 10:2

"The sole purpose of the Republican Party is to serve as an ineffective alternative to the Democrat Party." - GourmetDan

Offline mountaineer

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It surprises me that baseball players continue to chew tobacco, but cancer is the risk they assume. It's interesting how people who didn't expose themselves to tobacco carcinogens still get cancer, e.g., people who never smoked getting lung cancer and - like a good friend of mine currently undergoing chemotherapy - people who never used tobacco of any kind getting mouth cancer.
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Offline aligncare

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It surprises me that baseball players continue to chew tobacco, but cancer is the risk they assume. It's interesting how people who didn't expose themselves to tobacco carcinogens still get cancer, e.g., people who never smoked getting lung cancer and - like a good friend of mine currently undergoing chemotherapy - people who never used tobacco of any kind getting mouth cancer.

That's the strength and variability of the human genome at work. Everybody's got a grandfather-who-smoked into his 90s story. I even had a non-smoking patient in his 30s with lung cancer, once.

But, the paradox falls apart when you look at the numbers: the incidence of throat and mouth cancer (and lung cancer, of course) is significanlyt higher in tobacco users and dramatically lower in non-tobacco users.

There's no getting around it. If you choose to use tobacco in any form, you run a higher risk of serious disease. Morbidity and mortality go up significantly. It's your choice.