Thyroid Radiofrequency Ablation is the New Procedure the Local Surgeons Think Will Save Their Practice. Beware of Start Up Hospital Thyroid RFA Centers in Your Area.

Thyroid Radiofrequency Ablation is the New Procedure that Local Surgeons Think Will Save Their Practice.

Beware of Start Up Hospital Thyroid RFA Centers in Your Area. Also many physicians use RFA for other conditions such as veins and pain management. If they have an RFA system they can claim to do thyroid nodules as well! One website promoted pain management and thyroid nodules. This is just the beginning of the use of RFA for thyroid nodules and cancer. Just like we went through a long period of unqualified low volume surgeons doing thyroidectomies with higher complications we will see the same with thyroid RFA. When insurance pays for thyroid RFA there will be an explosion of  physicians and centers offering treatment. Many will not even be endocrinologists with knowledge of thyroid disease or thyroid surgeons.

Dr.Guttler’s Comments:

1.  General surgeons were doing thyroid surgery in their local practices for years.
2. The surgeons doing few thyroidectonies a year had a high complication rate compared to those doing > 25-50 cases a year.
3. This caused a drop in the cases done by these surgeons.
4. The use of thyroid RFA will cause a great decrease in thyroid surgeries for benign and small micropapillary thyroid cancers in the next 5 years.
5. What are these surgeons doing in local hospitals to save the hospital and their practices?
6. They are setting up hospital based Thyroid RFA Centers.
7. This will again cause a similar problem to the patient as finding a high volume thyroid surgeon. What RF center is a safe high volume RF center?
8. Many start up hospital Thyroid RFA centers are there to keep the patient in their system rather than referring out to long established expert endocrine interventional physicians.
9. Many do not refer out and still recommend surgery.
10. The patient has to find expert RFA endocrinologists via the internet.
11. The original reports of complications were from large series from expert operators in Italy and  Korea.
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13. Mass use of thyroid RFA by  low volume inadequately trained physicians will surely cause an increase in complications.
14. Any new procedure when it is done locally by many new operators the complication rate will increase and success rate decrease.
15. Before you sign up for thyroid RFA check the experience and training of the physician. How many training nodules done on cadavers, turkey breasts or bovine livers before they began treating their patients?
16. There is no certification needed to do Thyroid RFA. Any physician can buy a RFA system and use it on there patients.
17. Even worse they can put up a hospital RFA website, and pay google to put it on the first search page before the true search results.
18. These centers are suspect. Some list the physicians medical credentials but nothing about their training in thyroid RFA. There is no mention of results or complications.
19. One well known  California hospital listed all their endocrinologists and one surgeon as part of their thyroid RFA center. There was no mention of any of their training or practice experience before starting to do RFA on patients. The even falsely state Thyroid RF has FDA approval when it is done under soft tissue approval not thyroid.
20. My center has been involved in thyroid interventional ethanol ablation since 2000 and thyroid RFA for 6 years. I have trained endocrinologists in both in my master’s class and personally done ablation procedures on over 100 nodules in training on models and on my patients since FDA approval of soft tissue use.
21. Call me at 310-393-8860 or thyroid.manager@thyroid.com
22. Dr.G.