Lasers may have first been introduced into medicine 60 years ago, but removing disease while keeping healthy tissue intact can still be a complicated proposition, said Mark Courey, MD, director of the University of California San Francisco Voice Center, who gave a State of the Art Lecture here on April 20 at the 115th Annual Meeting of the Triological Society. The meeting was held as part of the Combined Otolaryngology Spring Meetings.
With the advent of fiberoptic and distal-chip scopes and other innovations, otolaryngologists are now able to perform many laryngeal diagnostic and therapeutic procedures on awake patients in the in-office setting rather than on fully anesthetized individuals in the operating room.
Transoral laser microsurgery (TLM) is a relatively new treatment in the United States and is a viable option for several types of head and neck cancer, allowing physicians to target tumors without needing to surgically disassemble the patient, according to the experts interviewed for this article.