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MEDICAL THYROIDECTOMY, MEDICAL HEPATECTOMY AND MEDICAL LOBECTOMY - TERMINOLOGYO P Kapoor
Hon. Visiting Physician, Jaslok Hospital and Bombay Hospital, Mumbai, Ex. Hon. Prof. of Medicine, Grant Medical College and JJ Hospital, Mumbai 400 008.
As a student I was taught that after extensive tuberculous infection of the kidney, sometimes that kidney is not seen on IVP examination because of so-called "nephrectomy" done by nature (kidney having become contracted to an invisible size).In practice I see patients coming for unexplained fever and high ESR whose thyroid scans show more or less zero radio-activity and are labelled as suffering from subacute thyroiditis. I would label this image of thyroid scan as "medical thyroidectomy" which would revert to normal after treatment.
I had a patient of severe alcoholic hepatitis whose isotope liver scan was nearly blank. This has been termed as "medical hepatectomy" and the image can come back to normal after stopping alcohol for a few days or a few weeks.
Often I see my patients of pul. embolism whose X-ray chest is normal and whose ventilation scans are normal but the perfusion scan shows huge defects in certain lobes which look blank. I am tempted to label these as "medical lobectomy". This is also a reversible situation.
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