Male Piercing

In the late 1960s, some medical professionals at the Houston Medical Center must have felt ready to use tongue piercing jewelry on one particular gossip. That was the man or woman who told a Houston newspaper that researchers at the Medical Center had found a way to fight lung cancer. A published article containing that claim brought long lines of people to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Yet the researchers had no cure for lung cancer. All that they had was a possible new way to test for susceptibility to lung cancer.

One writer living in Los Angeles County hesitates to wear any tongue piercing jewelry. That writer has learned that her uncle, her father’s brother, has cancer of the esophagus. Based on research the writer once performed at the Houston Medical Center, the writer does not want to invite the possibility that she too might develop esophageal cancer.

As a graduate student, the writer examined treated blood from five different subjects. She treated the blood with a chemical that can undergo changes in the body. Some people produce an enzyme that plays a key role in the biochemistry of those changes. Those changes can cause certain chemicals to become capable of altering the DNA in the body’s cells.

Those alterations can lead to the development of cancer. The chemical once studied by the research group in Houston has been linked to a rise in the cases of lung cancer. Still, air does not enter the lung through the esophagus. Inhaled air passes down the trachea. Why then does the writer in L.A. County hesitate to wear tongue piercing jewelry?

The writer knows that the digestive system contains many different enzymes. That includes enzymes that enter the mouth. One of those enzymes converts sugar to sucrose. The produced sucrose passes down the esophagus and into the stomach.

The writer can not be convinced that the body does not make other enzymes with the ability to transform chemicals, chemicals such as those in piercing jewelry. The writer worries about the possible existence of such enzymes in the mouth. The writer speculates that such enzymes might work on the chemicals that come-off of piercing jewelry.

The writer can visualize digestive juices with a concentrated amount of a cancer-producing chemical passing down the esophagus. That chemical could damage the DNA in the cells of the esophagus. That chemical could thus encourage the development of cancer of the esophagus.

Now this writer can produce no proof that such enzymes do in fact exist. This writer has never studied cells taken from a patient with cancer of the esophagus. She did once culture cells from a patient with a malignancy on the tonsils.

Still, this writer has found that medical science continues to discover new proteins in the body on a regular basis. Some of those proteins are enzymes. This writer would not be surprised to learn that some enzyme in the mouth has the ability to metabolize the chemicals from piercing jewelry.

Knowing now that she might produce such an enzyme, this writer has wanted to avoid getting cancer of the esophagus. With that goal in mind, this writer has refrained from going after a piercing specialist, and requesting the piercing of her tongue.