Use of Radioiodine for Thyroid cancer is not needed in Low Risk Patients

Why are nuclear medicine departments in major community hospitals still recommending
ablation therapy for most if not all their patients, regardless of the level of prognostic risk. Two major medical centers with top ten ratings, still have high rates of hospital treated high dose >75 Millicurie therapy for even low risk patients. One uses 150 MCI as standard therapy! 80 MCi or more have increased incidence of solid tumors of the stomach,bladder,prostate,penis, breast,and many more. Why is this happening even though the literature has no evidence it is helpful? The answer is found in the referral patterns of a given center. Busy diabetes and internal medicine endocrinologists and surgeons, commonly defer radiation decisions to the nuclear physician. It is like Little Red Riding Hood asking the wolf for his opinion on the best thing for dinner that night. The need for a new leader to decide the need for adjunct therapy should be a clinical thyroidologist, not the nuclear medicine physician. A clinical thyroidologist with the ability to do lymph node mapping, thyroglobulin, USGFNA of suspect cancer nodes, and can develop an endocrine neck lab to help the many endocrinologists who are too busy to master the skills to be expert at lymph node FNA, percutaneous ethanol injections of cancer nodes, would be the ideal new player in this field. The days of routine use of total body scan and radiation therapy by nuclear medicine is in decline, and that of thyroid ultrasonographers are in ascendancy.