How to evaluate the quality of a cleft-lift
For a surgeon some operations are easier to learn than others. The cleft-lift procedure can be challenging to learn, and one of the problems for a surgeon trying to learn this without a mentor, is knowing when a cleft-lift looks good, as opposed to when it needs more tweaking. An operation like an appendectomy is easy for a surgeon to evaluate: if the appendix has been removed, he or she have achieved their goal! The goal of a cleft-lift is more subjective, and how it should look is not always intuitive to surgeons trying this for the first few times. Because of this, some surgeons are not convinced that the cleft-lift is a successful operation, because when they tried it, it failed.
I have created a web page that shows the differences between a successful and an unsuccessful cleft-lift. It shows an image of a successful cleft-lift, and is annotated as to why it succeeded, and another image of a failed cleft-lift, with the same annotations. This page may be more helpful to surgeons than patients – but even as a patient, it may help to know this information.
I did not include the photos in this post, because they are somewhat graphic, and you may not want to see them. But, if you are interested, this link will take you to the page.
Leave a reply