Minimally invasive thyroid surgery: where are we now?

Commentary on transoral access for endoscopic thyroid resection

“…First, observation is relative to the definition of minimally invasive in endoscopic thyroid surgery. This may be defined by the length and location of incision, by the area needed for dissection, the minimization of cervical exploration and trauma, the use or not of a videoscope, cosmesis, locoregional anesthesia, pain, duration of procedure, or by an outpatient care setting [14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. The techniques proposed by Miccoli, Bellantone, and Henry are minimally invasive because the cervical access is direct, with less dissection area [6,7].…”

Pie Sharing or Food Fight? The Impact of Regulatory Changes on Media Market Competition in Singapore

“…MediaCorp was similarly accused by SPH of fudging the figures when it claimed that a readership of 580,000 made it the "undisputed second most widely read daily English newspaper in Singapore" (Ng, 2003, p. H7). Today executives quickly amended that claim to "second-highest morning daily" (p. H7) when SPH pointed out that its tabloid The New Paper, which it had started in 1988, had an average readership of 456,000 (Ng, 2003).…”

RE: Minimally invasive thyroid surgery: where are we now?

“…Professor Ng’s recent letter outlines very clearly many of the issues related to new procedures such as minimal access thyroid surgery and endoscopic thyroidectomy 1 . Those views are supported, in part, in the recent ‘Current Opinion’ section of the Asian Journal of Surgery where Yeung states that ‘controversy and criticism emerged after the initial cases of successful endoscopic thyroidectomy as the procedure results in few documented objective advantages to patients’ 2 .…”

“…Mini‐incision thyroid procedures on the other hand, simply require fine‐tuning of current dissection skills and should be able to be undertaken by any skilled thyroid surgeon. As shown in the illustration in Professor Ng’s letter 1 performing the procedure via the 2 cm lateral approach, as per the established technique for minimally invasive parathyroidectomy 3 has the potential to greatly improve the scar appearance. We believe that the procedure offers significant advantages when offered to patients with small single thyroid nodules requiring excision biopsy to exclude malignancy − conceptually this is just the next diagnostic step beyond fine needle biopsy.…”