Before & After: Cleft Lips |
Cleft lip is a birth defect. Dr. Joel Levin, Plastic Surgeon with Baptist Hospital of Miami, considers it’s important to start the cleft lips surgery as early as possible and advises doing surgery when he’s three months old.
Transcript
I do have a few pictures I want to share with our viewers let’s see if we can hold this one up I’m gonna hold it steady so this I don’t want to have my face in it but this is a child with a cleft lip doctor that’s the whole spectrum cleft lip the cleft palate the nose is deformed a teeth and the upper jaw are certainly out of sync and then let’s look at the difference when you stepped in and performed the surgery look at that that’s just astounding that’s fantastic doctor these these are this and the next one are older children but we all do we start the cleft lips surgery as early as three months three months if the child is otherwise healthy he’s fat and sassy and has a good hemoglobin we can go as early as three months and the earlier probably the better right the earlier parents certainly the parents the parents don’t like having this child with this deforming for so many exactly just the looks but the inability to nurse and other problems let me show one more picture of what I think is a young child you could see the issue that’s going on there dr. a cleft lip that’s the same thing that you see the nose is widely deformed and now we always work on these noses all right so let’s show the after you stepped in look at that oops I mean with this other way there we go what a big difference yeah and they get they require more than one surgery we usually do two or three touch-ups because as a child grows the scars don’t grow so the growth works against us and they can deform things so most of these kids know they’re going to be coming back for two or three procedures you