Applying thyroid cancer guidelines: a difficult task

Abstract

Clinical practice guidelines are a powerful tool in Medicine and provide evidence-based guidance on decision-making regarding diagnosis, management, and treatment. However, the implementation of guidelines can be quite challenging in certain cases. Applying Thyroid Cancer guidelines appears to be a difficult task, particularly regarding the decision for Iodine-131 therapy. The main reason for this, is the great number of available guidelines as well as, their partially controversial suggestions, while often guidelines prove to be rather confusing. All the aforementioned convert clinical practice from pure sciences into art. Our intention with this short commentary is to highlight the difficulties in applying guidelines for thyroid cancer in daily clinical practice and to emphasize the importance of individualized patient-centred approach, to enable the ideal decision making for each patient.