Thyroid and Parathyroid Center
OHSU Thyroid & Parathyroid Center
The OHSU Thyroid and Parathyroid Center is designed to provide comprehensive, streamlined care for patients with thyroid and parathyroid diseases involving both medical and surgical approaches. The multi-disciplinary clinic is staffed by endocrine surgeons from the OHSU Department of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery and by OHSU endocrinologists. Patients with thyroid nodules and cysts, goiters, thyroid cancer and parathyroid tumors are evaluated in this center.
Our surgeons are highly experienced endocrine surgeons. The Director of the Center, Dr. Maisie Shindo, has been performing primarily endocrine surgery since 1991, and has dedicated her career to the management of thyroid and parathyroid diseases. Dr. Shindo has done well over 4,000 thyroid and parathyroid surgeries, and is nationally respected as one of the top endocrine surgeons in the United States. Our surgeons at the Center also specialize in minimally invasive and robotic surgery. What this means for the patients is less scarring, often avoiding general anesthesia, and having a faster recovery time.
Management of patients with these disorders is complemented by the members of other specialties, such as Endocrinology, Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Medical Oncology, Pathology, and Radiation Oncology.
Our doctors
Dr Maisie Shindo is the director of the OHSU Thyroid & Parathyroid Clinic. Our surgeons, Dr. Shindo and Dr. Mira Milas are highly experienced endocrine surgeons who dedicate their career to surgical management of thyroid and parathyroid glands. Together with doctors from the OHSU division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, & Clinical Nutrition, doctors Dana Madison, Mary H Samuels, and Kathryn G Schuff, they oversee the care of our patients with disorders of the thyroid and parathyroid.
They also work closely with the doctors in the division of Head and Neck Cancer/ / Surgery, such as Dr Neil Gross. Dr Gross recently began providing OHSU patients with a special kind of surgery for the head and neck regions, using robotic instruments, called TORS, allowing for head and neck surgeries (such as thyroid surgeries) to be performed with minimal scarring. Dr Gross says this about the benefits of the robotic surgery:
"Traditional thyroid surgery leaves a scar in the neck. This is undesirable to many patients, particularly young women who are most likely to develop thyroid disease requiring surgery. In fact, transaxillary robotic-assisted thyroid surgery was pioneered in parts of Asia where neck scarring can jeopardize a women's chance of marriage. It has only recently been approved in the United States after sufficient safety data was generated. There are very few, high-volume thyroid surgery centers in the country to offer transaxillary robotic-assisted thyroid surgery at this time. I am honored to be the first to bring this leading technology to patients in the Pacific Northwest. While the benefits of the procedure are currently limited to cosmesis, I am confident that advances in instrumentation will translate to improved outcomes as well. I am very excited to be a part of continuing to bring cutting-edge care to thyroid and parathyroid patients in Oregon and beyond"
For advanced thyroid cancer, our medical oncologists dedicated to chemotherapy are Dr. Cristina Rodriguez and Dr. Matthew Taylor.
Hyperparathyroidism: It's Not All in Your Head
Video: Maisie Shindo, MD speaks at a recent OHSU health expert seminar
