PODCAST EPISODES

What does the future of thyroid care look like when the person describing it helped build the present? Dr. Eren Berber is a Professor of Surgery and Director of Robotic Endocrine Surgery at Cleveland Clinic. He performed some of the first robotic thyroid operations in the United States, brought thyroid RFA to Ohio, and has authored more than 350 scientific papers. He has spent his entire career at the forefront of thyroid innovation — and in this episode, he gives one of the most candid, compreh...

Navigating an Indeterminate Thyroid Nodule Diagnosis with Chelsie Paulson What do you do when your thyroid biopsy results leave you with more questions than answers? In this episode of Save Your Thyroid, I am joined by Chelsie Paulson, a vocal advocate and active member of our patient community. After an Afirma molecular test came back with a 50/50 inconclusive result, Chelsie was told that removing her thyroid was her only option. Instead of accepting lifelong thyroid hormone replacement, Chels...

For most thyroid patients, the path from diagnosis to treatment moves fast — sometimes too fast to stop and ask whether there's another way.Emily Saska's story started with a back scan. An incidental finding. A nodule she had never felt, never thought about, and never seen coming. Within weeks it was growing rapidly, visibly bulging in her neck, and she was sitting in an exam room being referred directly to a general surgeon — with no mention that any other option existed.Emily went home and Googled. She found the Save Your Thyroid community. She found Dr. Emad Kandil at Tulane University in New Orleans — an hour from her home in Baton Rouge. And she chose nanosecond pulsed field ablation — nsPFA — instead of surgery.The procedure happened on her 37th birthday. Her last memory before counting backwards from 10 was telling Dr. Kandil: happy birthday to me, hope you had your coffee. Three days later she was in Puerto Rico with her family. All she had was a band-aid.Six w…

For a long time, a thyroid nodule diagnosis followed a predictable path — symptoms appeared, surgery was scheduled, and the gland was removed. The question was never if you would have surgery. It was when.That's changing. And Dr. Ian Orozco is one of the physicians leading that change.Dr. Orozco is a board-certified interventional endocrinologist based in Provo, Utah, and one of the most experienced RFA providers in the Intermountain West. After five years performing RFA within a larger institution, he made a bold move — taking over the Thyroid Institute of Utah, the oldest thyroid-only practice in the state, and rebuilding it entirely around the modern thyroid patient.In this episode, he joins Jennifer Holkem to discuss what that independence means for patient care, why a thyroid-only practice produces a fundamentally different experience, and why the urgency you felt at the end of your surgical consult was probably more about the practice's schedule than your actual medi…

What does it take to bring cutting-edge, nonsurgical thyroid care to patients in smaller, underserved communities? In this episode, Jen sits down with Dr. Jacques Gaudet, a board-certified otolaryngologist and head and neck surgeon at Southern ENT Associates in South Louisiana, to find out.Dr. Gaudet traces his passion for thyroid care and ultrasound back to his medical training in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when resource-scarce conditions pushed him to master diagnostic ultrasound on his own terms. That same persistence eventually led him to become the second physician in the entire state of Louisiana to offer thyroid RFA — not to chase a trend, but to give his patients real options.In this conversation, Dr. Gaudet and Jen cover:Why ultrasound expertise is non-negotiable for anyone performing RFAHow he counsels anxious patients newly diagnosed with thyroid nodulesWhat success actually looks like after RFA — and why symptom relief matters more than…

Anne Moeller had a multinodular goiter the size of a grapefruit that had grown significantly after two pregnancies, causing a severely deviated trachea and increasing pressure on her airway. With a thyroidectomy already scheduled, she stumbled across information about non-surgical thyroid treatments just weeks before her surgery date — and everything changed.In this episode, Anne shares how she went from knowing nothing about alternatives to surgery, to becoming her own most informed advocate. She walks us through her research process, how she found the Save Your Thyroid community, and why she ultimately chose thyroid artery embolization (TAE) with Dr. Juan Camacho over surgery.Anne also opens up about what the procedure was actually like as a patient, her gradual recovery, and how her thyroid function has remained stable throughout. As someone based in the UK navigating a healthcare system where TAE is only just emerging, her story offers a unique international perspective on wha…

100 Cases! Dr. Emad Kandil Discusses nPulse Thyroid Nodule Ablation Can you treat a thyroid nodule without heat or surgery? In this milestone episode of Save Your Thyroid, Jennifer Holkem welcomes back pioneer Dr. Emad Kandil, Chief of Endocrine Surgery at Tulane University, to celebrate a massive clinical achievement: completing over 100 cases using nPulse™ nanosecond Pulsed Field Ablation (nsPFA). While Radiofrequency Ablation (RFA) and Microwave Ablation (MWA) use thermal energy (heat) to des...

In this episode of Save Your Thyroid, Jennifer sits down with Tosin, a patient whose routine checkup revealed a complex multinodular goiter that had quietly grown down into his chest. Facing a highly invasive sternotomy to remove the mass and the prospect of lifelong medication, Tosin leaned into his curiosity and began searching for alternatives. His journey led him from Houston to Florida to undergo Thyroid Artery Embolization (TAE) with Dr. Juan Camacho. Tosin shares the realities of his diagnosis, what it feels like to undergo TAE, the temporary side effects of recovery, and the incredible news that his goiter shrank by over 80% in just six months—allowing him to keep his thyroid completely intact and fully functional.

Is Your Thyroid Sick, Starved, or Toxic?

Most people are told that if a thyroid goiter is "too large" or has "dived" into the chest, the only option is a total thyroidectomy—often involving a sternotomy (cracking the chest bone) to reach the tissue. In today’s episode, I sit down with Matthew Ashby, who faced exactly this crossroads. Matthew shares his powerful journey of navigating a massive multinodular goiter, the "silent" symptoms that began to impact his breathing, and how he successfully avoided major surgery by choosing Thyroid ...

How This Nonsurgical Treatment Can Shrink Massive Goiters (Dr. Juan Camacho)