Our treatment of cleft lip and cleft palate

Our principle in cleft lip and cleft palate repair is all-round personal treatment. That is, treatment concentrates not only on cleft lip and cleft palate repair, but also considers the patient comprehensively in terms of his or her personality. In this report, we present patients with cleft lips and/or cleft palates for whom we performed surgical treatments in the past 25 years. We performed primary operations for 402 patients and secondary operations for 120. Cleft lip and cleft palate should be managed with consideration for otolaryngeal aspects as well as plastic surgical ones because of the nature of the disease. We therefore treated our patients from the standpoints of both medical fields, and gained much appreciation from parents whose children suffered from the congenital anomaly.