Sialendoscopy

[David Cognetti MD]
I think one of the things we were going to talk about was how do I present sialendoscopy to patients, right? I do it in a pretty simplistic manner. So, every one of our exam rooms has a sink in it, right? I usually describe myself as a plumber. If you look at the sink, I explain to them that their gland makes saliva, and the drain to the sink is backed up, right?

So, for a stone, they have a hairball or something in the drain, it's clogged, and then the sink overflows when you run the water. So, the overflowed sink for them is the gland swells and they get pain. They understand that.

So, I say to them, "My job is I go in like a Roto-Rooter and I take out the clog." The analogy works because sometimes they were offered removal of the gland, and I say to them, "If you had a clogged sink in your house and you called the plumber and they came and said, 'I'll take care of your problem. Let me just take away your sink,' you wouldn't really want that, right? So, let's take away the clog and that's a fix."

Then I'll say to the inflammatory people the problem with your situation is you don't just have a clog, you have a rusty sink. The entire thing is ruined, right? It affects not just the drain, the sink itself, the faucet, the water source, et cetera. So, it's a different problem. It's less likely to get full resolution, and we have to ask ourselves what our expectations and goals are.

So, it's easiest to address obstructive symptoms and even inflammatory radioactive iodine, patients can have instructive symptoms because they have strictures and they have mucous plugs and they have other things on top of their underlying rusty sink. Sialendoscopy does a pretty good job.

So, if you look at the papers on it, people get relief from those symptoms after sialendoscopy for inflammatory problems. However, it's not going to fix the entire sink. It's not necessarily going to give them a stronger flow of water from their faucet. So, you have to be realistic. If they're not there for swelling and/or discomfort and they're only there for dry mouth, that you're not giving them the expectation that sialendoscopy is going to improve their xerostomia.

Now, the rusty sink issue comes into play when sialendoscopy doesn't work. You get in there and they're still having problems. You can't get the stricture open. They'll still have swelling because it's good for my next analogy, which is botox, which is often a backup plan or certainly a treatment algorithm for these inflammatory situations. I describe that with botox, we're turning off the faucet. We're turning off the water source, so the sink can't overflow because you're not turning on the faucet at all.