What is a Neck Dissection?
There are two basic sorts of neck dissection: 1:A radical neck dissection is a surgical operation, which aims to remove all the lymph nodes in the neck between the jaw and the collarbones. This operation may be carried out if there is evidence that there are one or more nodes affected with cancer in the neck. The nodes are often small and stuck to structures in the neck, so we usually remove other tissues as well to ensure that we get a complete clearance of the cancer nodes. We only remove structures which you can safely do without, and those which do not leave serious long lasting affects. 2:A partial neck dissection is performed when there are strong suspicions that there may be microscopic amounts of cancer cells in nodes in the neck. In this case we tend to only remove those groups of nodes which are most likely to be affected in your type of cancer. In both sorts of operation we send all the tissues away to the laboratory to search for cancer cells and to see how extensive the sp
