The reasons for the surgery may be different. There are cases when surgery is preferred by a patient or unavoidable Mostly there are the following circumstances:

1) If a person has thyroid cancer, surgery is used as an unavoidable treatment;
2) During pregnancy those women ,whose bodies are not tolerate with antithyroid drugs, are usually operated, in order to save their future child;
3) Sometimes a goiter or nodules may bring about different swallowing or breathing problems, and need to be operated;
4) When a child has thyroid disease very often his parents agree for the operation to avoid radioactive iodine, which could negatively influence the child’s development;
5) There are also cases when patients refuse taking antithyroid drugs or radioactive iodine, then a surgery becomes a usual way out;
6) The women, who are suffering from thyroid disease, may have a desire to be operated, in order to get pregnant in the nearest future.

Naturally, to have no negative subsequences after the surgery you should find a rather experienced surgeon.
In fact, there are three major thyroid surgery types:

1) Total Thyroidectomy, 2) Partial Thyroidectomy and 3) Thyroid Lobectomy.

From the name you could guess that total thyroidectomy implies complete removal of the thyroid. It is the most usual type of surgery and is used for removal of medullary, an aggressive cancer. On the other hand, total thyroidectomy is used as hyperthyroidism treatment.

Partial thyroidectomy means subtotal removal, or removal of half of the thyroid gland. It is usually used when the cancer is small or non-aggressive. The operation goes together with a bilateral subtotal thyroidectomy.

The third type of thyroid surgery is thyroid lobectomy, removal of a quarter of the gland.

This operation is not typically used for thyroid cancer, because the cells should be non-aggressive and small.

Surgery usually lasts no more than two hours and is not rather complicated. If everything is alright partial thyroidectomy takes, for example, usually 45 minutes.

It’s important for a patient to check with the surgeon about what he or she should do in the days before the operation. For example, the patient may be recommended to take or not to take these or another drugs, etc. In the morning of the surgery the patient is usually asked to come to hospital to be checked once more.