DOCTOR INTERVIEWS

Quality of Life​

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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Lifestyle

81: Recovering From Thyroid Cancer Surgery, Faster, Better, and Stronger with Evan Simon, Head Strength & Conditioning Coach at Oregon State University

In this episode, we hear from Evan Simon, Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Oregon State University. Evan was diagnosed with advanced Stage IV thyroid cancer, which resulted a 13 hour surgery.
At the end of his surgery, Evan was told he would not be able to lift his hands overhead for 3 months, instead he broke the odds, taking him only 3 weeks.

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