There is a small segment of the surgical community that is currently suggesting that all thyroid surgery should be performed using a new nerve monitoring technology. This would not guarantee that there would be no nerve damage, just that it might be less likely.

Some physicians wonder if this idea is motivated by financial gain. Others believe that this new approach may indeed be useful, especially for young and inexperienced surgeons, where a referral to a more senior colleague is not possible. Still others believe that “if you don’t know where the nerve is, you shouldn’t be doing the operation”.

We will not take sides in this debate. We will say, however, that we have always found the recurrent laryngeal nerve in every routine thyroidectomy we have ever done, and after thousands of successful thyroid operations and thousands of satisfied patients, we will continue to perform the safe thyroid surgery that this practice has done now for almost 55 years.