Doctor Interviews

Functional Medicine

Podcast

97: Five Important Things Your Thyroid Surgeon Maybe Not Telling You, with Dr. Akira Miyauchi

During this episode, the following topics are discussed:
1. Financial burden of surgery versus total cost of active surveillance over ten years. 
2. Stretching Exercises for Neck
3. Setting patient expectations prior to FNA to manage anxiety
4. When the laryngeal nerve is severed during thyroid surgery, it can and should be repaired, with proper surgeon skill and training. 
5. The most common question asked to Dr. Miyauchi by surgeons from around the world. 

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Lifestyle

96: Rethinking Thyroid Cancer – When Saying No to Surgery Maybe Best for You with Dr. Allen Ho from Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles

Weighing treatment options for thyroid cancer, with deep consideration for the patient’s lifestyle, could become the new norm in assessing whether surgery is the best path.

Dr. Allen Ho states, “if a patient is a ballerina or an opera singer, or any other profession that could be jeopardized due to undesired consequences of thyroid cancer surgery, then the best treatment path maybe active surveillance.” Undesired consequences of thyroid cancer surgery could be vocal cord paralysis, damage to the parathyroid glands resulting in calcium deficiencies, excessive bleeding or formation of a major blood clot in the neck, shoulder nerve damage, numbness, wound infection, and mental impairment due to hypothyroid-like symptoms.

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Lifestyle

95: Thyroid Cancer Patients Experience Quality of Life Downgrade with Dr. Raymon Grogan and Dr. Briseis Aschebrook from the University of Chicago Medicine

“The goal of this study is to turn it into a long-term, longitudinal cohort,” said Grogan, who hopes to develop a tool that physicians can use to assess the psychological wellbeing of thyroid cancer survivors. “But, there was no way to do that with thyroid cancer because no one had ever studied quality of life or psychology of thyroid cancer before.”

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Endocrine

94: Take a Step Back⎢Thyroid Surgery with a Clear Mind, with Dr. Bryan McIver from Moffitt Cancer Center

Bryan McIver, MD, PhD
Dr. McIver contributes to Moffitt Cancer Center almost 20 years of clinical experience in the care of patients with endocrine diseases, specializing in the evaluation of patients with thyroid nodules and thyroid cancer. He has a particular interest in the management of patients with advanced and aggressive forms of cancer and the role of genetic and molecular techniques to improve the accuracy of diagnosis.
Most nodules are benign
When to do a biopsy
How to interpret the results of biopsy
Advances in thyroid cancer
Ultrasound technology advancements
Molecular markers
Cytopathology categorizations
Molecular marker technologies
Gene expression classifier

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