As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed, all things change. Certainly, the history of surgical treatment of patients with lung cancer is an example. There is both more and less. LESS For the consideration of “less” there is the consideration of the amount of lung the thoracic surgeon removes when operating Read More
Category: Chest Surgery
I continually boggle to consider how much surgical treatment of these malignancies has evolved and results have improved since I completed my thoracic surgery residency and began my practice of genera thoracic surgery in 1981. The two changes with the most impact are the way these operations are performed and Read More
There are few more distressing sensations than having difficulty swallowing, called dysphagia. There are, perhaps surprisingly, many causes of this feeling. The awareness of a lump in our throat when emotions run high—saying goodbye to a loved one for example—is, thankfully, short lived and only a temporary cause of difficulty Read More
Few, if any, lung cancers are cured (gone forever) without surgery to remove them. On the other hand, not all patients are cured by their operation and many are not thought to be candidates for an operation. The goal of all treating physicians, medical oncologists as well as thoracic surgeons, Read More
You may never have heard of achalasia. This uncommon disorder of esophageal function was a mystery for many years until physicians took advantage of the advent of esophageal motility studies to first define it and next to develop treatments. Esophageal motility studies use a catheter inside the esophagus to evaluate Read More
In 1895 William Macewen, a Scot, removed an entire lung from a patient with rampant infection. He was the first to successfully accomplish this operation, a pneumonectomy. Remarkably, he incorporated none of the technical actions that are and have been routinely and consistently used by thoracic surgeons for many years Read More
It seems time to revisit this topic. Barrett’s esophagus picked up its name years ago when the surgeon Norman Barrett in England performed an esophagectomy on a patient with an ulcer in the esophagus. The final pathologic exam of the esophagus showed that the cells lining the inside of the Read More
The last two posts reviewed the thoracic surgical thought that informs the decision-making process for a patient being evaluated for a lung cancer operation. If the cancer is potentially curable and pulmonary assessment shows the patient will have sufficient lung function after the operation it’s a go. But a third Read More
In my previous blog I reviewed the concerns a surgeon has about the impact of a lung cancer operation—which costs a patient some of their breathing capacity—on a patient’s quality of life and how that determines the amount of lung that the surgeon can remove; quality of life after surgery Read More
I thought it was time to revisit the topic of operations for lung cancer. The surgeon has options which differ in the amount of lung being removed. The surgeon’s goal in all cases is to cure the cancer but they are constrained by the patient’s ability to tolerate, both immediately Read More
