Changing Face of Oral Cancer Patients

Head and neck cancers are fairly treatable, but in removing tumors patients often faced devastating effects. Losing part of their jaw or tongue, for example. The trend in surgical oncology is to offer more palpable procedures.

“After you take the cancer out, you have to be able to put them back together if you will. A big goal of ours is to give our patients a reasonable quality of life afterwards,” says Dr. Tony Anfuso, who is a surgical head and neck oncologist on medical staff of Lee Memorial Health System.

A specialist in head and neck cancer surgery, Dr. Tony Anfuso is offering advanced techniques to patients in Southwest Florida; including free flap reconstruction.

“That’s where you take either some soft tissue from the arm or the thigh or you can take bone from the leg and reconstruct a mandible. And you use that tissue to reconstruct their tissues of the head and neck,” says Dr. Anfuso.

Building on better surgical options, today’s oral cancer patients face a better future. The newly relocated tissue is altered to look and perform as closely as possible to the original: decreasing disfigurement and boosting quality of life, a far different outlook than in years past.

“If you go back, say 10 years ago, patients were getting more radical neck dissections. There was more accessory nerve damage. Radiation wasn’t quite as pinpointed. Chemo drugs were a little bit different. So we had a full gamut of different side effects,” says Stacey Brill, a speech pathologist with Lee Memorial Health System.

Many patients were left speechless or unable to eat or drink without a feeding tube; consequences which are seen less frequently now.

“We’re still treating their swallowing deficits. They just had greater deficits,” says Brill.

Removing cancer and a major side effect, free flap reconstruction is changing the landscape.

“The chances of this flap surviving is higher today than it’s ever been and we can do it in a shorter amount of time. That allows us to do bigger surgeries, and tackle bigger cancers,” says Dr. Anfuso.

Making life after cancer much easier to swallow.


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Lee Memorial Health System in Fort Myers, FL is the largest network of medical care facilities in Southwest Florida and is highly respected for its expertise, innovation and quality of care. For nearly a century, we’ve been providing our community with everything from primary care treatment to highly specialized care services and robotic assisted surgeries.

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