Internationally, oral cancer occupies the 6th place among all tumors in the body, but China is not one of the regions with high incidence of oral cancer and is outside the top 10. Due to the importance of oral function, patients and their family members are often in a situation of confusion, confusion and panic once they suffer from oral cancer. There is a correlation between the incidence of oral cancer and lifestyle such as chewing tobacco betel nut, alcoholism and long-term consumption of pickled food. In some southern provinces of China, including Taiwan, residents generally like to chew betel nut, so its incidence rate is obviously higher than other provinces. It is worth noting that poor oral hygiene, long-term and repeated irritation from root and crown remnants and poor restorations can cause traumatic ulcers or chronic inflammatory ulcers, which in turn can lead to the occurrence of oral cancer. For early-stage oral cancer, surgery alone can achieve a 5-year survival rate of up to 80-90%. For intermediate and advanced oral cancer, surgery combined with radiotherapy and chemotherapy is a comprehensive sequential treatment strategy. Since the 1970s, the 5-year survival rate of intermediate and advanced oral cancer has been hovering around 60%, meanwhile, surgical resection causes damage to patients’ facial appearance, oral swallowing and speech function, which seriously affects patients’ eating and social interaction. Because of the superficial location of oral cavity, it is easy to self-monitor and clinically diagnose compared with lung, liver and other organ tumors. Therefore, developing strategies for early detection and early treatment of oral cancer can effectively improve the cure rate and survival rate of oral cancer, reduce public health expenses, and minimize the impact on patients’ quality of life, which is the best medical countermeasure to prevent and treat oral cancer. The occurrence and development of oral cancer is a gradual process, the course of which can range from months to decades. In the early stage, it is often asymptomatic and the lesions are limited, manifesting as potentially malignant lesions or states, such as mucosal white spots, erythema, flat moss, etc., which can be detected at this stage through simple and systematic oral examination. For clinical high-risk groups, the means of early diagnosis include optical examination, tissue staining examination, saliva examination and DNA ploidy analysis, etc. However, the gold standard of oral cancer diagnosis in clinical practice is still excisional biopsy, and there is still no specific molecular diagnosis that can be used as a sufficient basis for diagnosis. Receiving regular consultation from oral surgeons is the key to oral cancer prevention and early diagnosis and treatment. The surgical treatment of oral cancer in China is recognized as the advanced level internationally, but compared with the international advanced level in early prevention, diagnosis and treatment, the government still needs to invest more public health costs, popularize oral cancer knowledge, improve patients’ awareness of self-testing, and receive standardized treatment as early as possible, so as to ultimately improve the quality of life and life expectancy of the whole population.