First Appointment
Find your care
We deliver effective, minimally invasive treatments in a caring environment. Call to connect with an expert in endocrine surgery.
Your First Appointment
Getting ready for your initial consultation and what to expect.
Where to start
If you are looking to have surgery for thyroid, parathyroid, or adrenal disease, please start by completing the online . Our inbox is checked multiple times per day, including weekends and holidays. You should receive a response from our office within one business day. If you are not already a UCLA Health patient, we will start by registering you in our system.
Next, please download the . The MyChart app is a great way to communicate with your doctors, upload information, and receive care via telehealth appointments.
Getting you to the right doctor
If you are not quite ready for surgery or require further evaluation to determine if surgery is necessary for you, our office will direct you to the doctor best suited to help with your problem. For example, most thyroid nodules are benign and do not require surgery. Therefore, it is often valuable to have biopsy results available before meeting with a surgeon. If you need a thyroid nodule biopsy (also known as fine-needle aspiration or FNA), our office will help you to schedule one. We have many convenient locations in Los Angeles where this can be done by an expert.
Gathering key information
To ensure that you get the most of your initial consultation with one of our surgeons, it is important to have the following types of key information uploaded into our system: lab tests (blood and sometimes urine), imaging reports (ultrasound, CT scans, and MRI scans), biopsy reports (from an FNA or pathology from prior surgery), and notes from your referring doctor.
Your medical records may already be available electronically
If you are an existing UCLA Health patient or have received care in a health system that uses the Epic electronic health record, most of your key information will be accessible to us via Care Everywhere. If this is the case, you won ’t need to upload any information.
Please keep in mind that if you have had lab tests performed at Quest or LabCorp, your results may not be visible to us electronically unless the tests were originally ordered by a UCLA physician.
Hospital systems that use Epic include:
- Cedars-Sinai
- Kaiser Permanente
- UC San Diego
- UC San Francisco
- Hoag
- Loma Linda
- City of Hope
- Scripps Health
- Cottage Health
- Sansum Clinic
- UC Irvine
- Stanford
- Providence
- MemorialCare
- Sutter Health
- Mayo Clinic
Useful labs for your first appointment:
- Thyroid:
TSH - Parathyroid:
ACTH
Cortisol (blood, 24-hour urine, or saliva)
Catecholamines (such as epinephrine and norepinephrine, 24-hour urine)
Metanephrines (such as metanephrine and normetanephrine, plasma or 24-hour urine)
Aldosterone
Plasma renin activity - Adrenal:
Calcium (blood level)
Ionized calcium
25-hydroxy Vitamin D
Albumin
Phosphate
Parathyroid hormone (PTH)
Calcium (24-hour urine level)
Most of the time, we receive imaging reports (this is a text document containing a radiologist ’s interpretation of a scan) from patients and referring physician offices. Though these are useful, we often need to see the actual images in order to plan for surgery. Outside images can be uploaded using lifeIMAGE. Images of CT scans, MRI scans, parathyroid sestamibi scans, and PET scans should be uploaded when available. If you are coming for an in-person consultation, it is not necessary to upload ultrasound images, since one of our surgeons will personally perform an ultrasound on you during your appointment. If you are from out of town and interested in our distance surgery program, uploading ultrasound images may assist us in planning your itinerary.
If you are missing any of the above lab tests or scans, please don ’t worry – that happens all the time, and we can always fill in any information gaps when or after you arrive. This is particularly true of certain specialized scans, such as parathyroid 4D-CT scans, FDG PET-CT scans, and gallium-68 DOTATATE PET-CT scans, which are best performed here on our equipment.
What type of appointment is best for you?
If you live within 1-hour drive of UCLA, an in-person consultation is probably best. This allows us to examine you and perform an ultrasound exam for thyroid or parathyroid disease.
If you live outside of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, you may choose an initial telehealth appointment (video visit). The goal of this visit is to review key information, answer questions, and plan an itinerary for our Distance Surgery Program, in which in-person evaluation, labs, scans, surgery, and recovery are packaged into a single episode of care to minimize travel time.
Things to bring to your first appointment
- A list of questions
- A list of your current medications and their dosages
- One adult family member or a trusted friend
- An open mind (see below)
- If you are coming for a thyroid or parathyroid condition, try not to wear a turtleneck or anything with a tight collar
And finally, a word about “Dr. Google”
It is natural to type one’s symptoms or diagnosis into the search bar and start reading. In 2024, Dr. Google certainly sees every patient before we do. Please keep in mind that medical misinformation is just as common as real medical information on the internet. The internet is full of quacks, snake-oil salesmen, and other unethical predators looking to make a buck. We have had patients who were so scared by medical misinformation that they never sought appropriate care for their conditions. As knowledgeable as Dr. Google is, there is no substitute for seeing a doctor. Remember, Dr. Google has never examined you or scanned you, and really knows next to nothing about your health – for this reason, we see that the #1 problem our patients have in dealing with internet health information is that most of the information they read is not actually pertinent to them. We are here to give you advice that is customized to your specific case.
Find your care
We deliver effective, minimally invasive treatments in a caring environment.
Call to connect with an expert in endocrine surgery.