Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Diagnosis
and Management of Cancer of the
Head and Neck
Jesus E. Medina, M.D.
Chairman
Cancer of the Head and Neck
Clinical Practice Guidelines Task Force
The Executive Committee of the American Society for Head and Neck Surgery and the Society of Head and Neck Surgeons decided to develop practice guidelines for the management of head and neck tumors in 1995. Two years ago, the leadership of the American Head and Neck Society appointed a Practice Guidelines Committee to review and update these guidelines.
The Committee selected practitioners to review the existing guidelines, in order to ensure that they reflect the most current knowledge about the management of the different neoplasms of the head and neck region. These individuals were selected because of their expertise and involvement in multidisciplinary care of head and neck cancer patients. They are referred to as the Practice Guidelines Task Force.
The Committee felt it was necessary to add guidelines for the management of neoplasms of the skull base and parapharyngeal space, as well as, general principles of surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, imaging, and tracheostomy care.
The completed guidelines were compiled and edited by Jesus E. Medina, M.D. These guidelines are not all encompassing and are not intended to be definitive or dogmatic, since all knowledge is subject to change. Achieving complete agreement on all aspects of head and neck oncology is not possible. Therefore, the guidelines represent the consensus of a group of practitioners with diverse opinions.
The guidelines developed are intended to:
Improve the quality of clinical care, by assisting physicians and patients in decision making.
Promote the delivery of cost-effective care by reducing unwarranted variations in clinical practice. Warranted practice variations are those due to differences in the interpretation of scientific evidence, differences in individual patient characteristics, physician experience and local variation in medical resources. Unwarranted variations in clinical practice, on the other hand, are those that originate from ignorance or deliberate disregard of well documented preferable practices, poor skills or poor management of the delivery system. Examples of the latter are the indiscriminate use of chemotherapy for the treatment of early head and neck cancers and the use of radionuclide scans of liver and bone to routinely screen head and neck cancer patients for distant metastases.
Assist individuals and specialty organizations in the assessment of costs associated with the delivery of appropriate care to patients with head and neck cancer.
