Medialization thyroplasty is used for the management of vocal fold paralysis. During this procedure, a prosthesis is placed lateral to the inner perichondrium of the thyroid lamina. The structural integrity of the vocal fold is preserved with effective closure of the pre-phonatory gap, the result being vocal efficiency.
In our series of 4 patients in the last 1 year, we tried a new method of anesthesia which enabled us to get a view of vocal cords during the entire surgery and hence helped us in gauging the extent and the level of medialization during the procedure.
This procedure may be advocated in cases where we feel the patient may not cooperate with local anesthesia and a general anesthesia would result in medialisation being done without the view of the endolarynx, resulting in suboptimal results.