When Plastic Surgery Saves Lives: Cranofacial Disorders
We’ve repeatedly refered to several trends that make plastic and cosmetic surgery sometime look like extremely superficial, a means to relieve people’s lack of self confidence, but this is just a wrong perception. Good news are coming from India. IJPS (Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery) reported the story of Jigar Kumar who took advantage of Plastic Surgery in order to reverse the social effects of cranofacial disorder (Mr. Kumar was born with a cleft clip and cleft palate which made him looking noticeably different)! What pushed him opt for plastic surgery? The fact that the parents of his special one couldn’t accept his deformity.
And obviously this is not a single occasion. According to IJPS, among 24 millions of births every year almost 30000 appear such abnormalities. These deformitites can lead infants even to death. The good thing is that now plastic surgery can treat them efficiently and we feel it’s quite important to share such news in order to boost awareness regarding such conditions.
The surgeon that treated Mr. Kumar, Dr. Vinod Vij, refers to the restoration technique: “The gap in between his lips was filled by regeneration of his lip cells through the process called millard repair and temmison repair. Since the lip cells are different, we cannot take skin from the thigh or elsewhere like in general plastic surgery cases.” Dr. Sij also highlights the importance of fixing such issues much earlier: “I have operated another 35-year-old man apart from Mr Kumar for craniofacial defect that late in life. It is much preferable that patients undergo surgery during childhood as organs are less developed at that time”
Here lies a crystal clear example of why plastic and cosmetic surgery has a really crucial raison d’être!
Please Enter Your Facebook App ID. Required for FB Comments. Click here for FB Comments Settings page