Dr. Jonathan Russell, a thyroid surgeon trained at Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins, discusses radiofrequency ablation and scarless surgery as alternatives to traditional thyroid removal. RFA can treat benign nodules, cancerous growths, and toxic nodules without leaving a scar or removing the entire gland.
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Today we are tackling a game changing.
Topic in thyroid health.
How new and minimally invasive techniques are revolutionizing the treatment of thyroid nodules. We're going beyond the standard approach of thyroid surgery and instead we're exploring radio frequency ablation, or rfa, as well as scarless thyroid surgery, both of which are transforming the way that we manage thyroid conditions. To help us unpack all of this, I am honored to be joined by a true expert in this field, Dr. Jonathan Russell. He is a leading expert in cutting edge thyroid treatments, including radio frequency ablation. This man has more studies on this topic than I ever dreamed of and it's scarless thyroid surgery. Dr. Russell is the founder of the Russell center, where he specializes in providing patients with alternatives to traditional thyroid surgery, helping them avoid unnecessary scarring and potentially lifelong thyroid medication, as well as empowering them to choose the best, best specific path for their journey. His extensive experience and dedication to advancing minimally invasive thyroid care had made him the go to authority for patients seeking effective yet less aggressive treatment options. Today we're going to dive into how RFA can be used to treat a variety of thyroid nodules, including benign, cancerous and toxic, while also exploring the groundbreaking possibilities of scarless thyroid surgery. If you've ever felt stuck between weight and watch or jumping straight into surgery, this conversation is for you.
Foreign.
I am so excited to have this conversation today. Thank you so much, Dr. Jonathan Russell, for being here. We're excited to learn about what is on the horizon and the next evolution of thyroid care when it comes to nodules, cancer, all of that, that really I feel like needs to evolve and you're on the forefront of that. So I'm excited to share with listeners everything that you've been working on. So thanks for being here.
Thanks, McCall. So happy to be here and so excited. You and I had a great conversation a couple of weeks ago as you just kind of took me through your journey that got you here. And it's been really fun to watch how successful you've been and how much you've been able to help people by using science in a way that kind of reaches down and makes it a little bit more personal. So bravo.
I love it.
I think our journeys are certainly parallel, so I'm excited to explore that more and more. Tell me a little bit about your background, where you've come from, how you sort of ended up in this niche and even in the field of RFA and progressive thyroid alternative options for people.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on in thyroid which is really fun to say. Thyroid surgery has been kind of static for 120, 130 years. Theodore Kocher won a Nobel Prize back in the early 1900s for making thyroid surgery safe. And it's almost like the field just stopped after that. It was like, oh, good, we have a safe surgery. We're good. And. And it's really started to evolve in the last decade, and it's been a great time to be a thyroid and parathyroid surgeon and just watch and help to develop. I. I did my training at the Cleveland Clinic, and as I was trying to pick a specialty I really fell in love on, I was sure that I didn't want to be a surgeon because surgeons are all arrogant jerks. Right? That's the stereotype. Even as a medical student, we think that about. We think that about surgeons. And I did my surgery rotation, and I fell in love with. With thyroid surgery, specifically, just because of how elegant it is and how. How the anatomy is just amazing. And there's a level of artistry that goes into it just to make it look good. It's not. It's not cosmetic surgery. It's cancer surgery most of the time, or very functional surgery, but at the same time, it has to look good. And it was just. It appealed to every. Every part of me. So at. At the Cleveland Clinic, I. I stayed there and did my training and had neck surgery, treating all of the different head neck cancers, and then did a focused thyroid fellowship at Johns Hopkins and stayed there for almost 10 years before leaving about six months ago to start my own practice here in Maryland.
Well, congratulations.
Right?
That's an exciting. That's an exciting time for you, for sure. I know that one thing that you've done a lot of research on, that you've really been a part of and foundational in, is the movement of rfa, or radio frequency ablation. And that is a topic no one really knows about on a consumer level, but even on a clinician level, like.
It'S just so true.
Yeah, it's incredibly fascinating and new, and I'm really excited to dig into a little bit about that today. Before we kind of head towards that aspect of the conversation, I wanted you to tell us a little bit about how you ended up pursuing RFA and how you found yourself in this situation.
So, first of all, thank you. I'm excited because you have a huge reach and it gives us a chance to get in front of patients and say, hey, if you're being told that you need surgery, let's consider all the options because a lot of doctors and even surgeons don't know about these options yet. And if you as the patient are empowered to come and say, hey, what about this? All of a sudden it opens up a whole different channel. And it's so disappointing for me to meet a patient who could have had a non surgical option and they just feel it's you. Even if you choose surgery at the end, just the ability to have options, it makes you feel better. It makes you feel like you made a choice instead of you took what you had to have. So thank you first of all for that. My, my own personal journey is a little bit funny on this one. My very first day at Johns Hopkins. So I, I'm doing this fellowship, right, which is an extra dedication. You finished all your training. You're a licensed doctor. You can do everything. You take an extra.
