So what are some important questions that you would want to know or we should know to ask as part of a medical history for a patient who comes in with a neck mass.

And you're exactly right.

A lot of the differential can be narrowed down with an excellent history.

And when I step back and look at all of the different etiologies, I have found that What's best to recategorize these etiologies is into tender neck masses or non-tender neck masses, which is very easy to differentiate right off the bat with the first couple of questions in terms of tenderness.

And then of course, in this Venn diagram of non-tender and tender, you do have situational diseases, which can be non-tender sometimes and then tender other times.

The reason I think that this is really useful is because if you think about just the things that can be tender and painful, or situationally tender and painful, you can narrow that down with history and sometimes some labs alone.

And so you can get rid of a large swath of your differential if they are tender.

But what other tools might you use to evaluate a neck mass? Fine needle aspirate, biopsy?