Abstract
Submucous cleft palate is troublesome to diagnose, for it is sometimes difficult to find the anomaly in the oral region. There are also many problems in starting its treatment. Therefore, in order to prevent or resolve such problems, we sent questionaires to these patients.
The resulting conclusions follow:
1. Most patients visited pediatrics first and secondly obstetrics, home doctors and public health centers, but these medical institutions did not always give correct diagnosis and rarely gave suitable advice. Such suitable advice came mostly from the speech clinic, oral surgery and otolaryngology (79%), followed by pediatric department (10.5%) and others (0%).
2. We could find that different lapsed time from the first visit by the patients to the clinic till their receiving proper treatments depended upon whether they received good advice or not. In Group A which could get some advice, all cases except one case (cardiac disease) received proper treatment within two years. However, only 22% of Group B and 33% of Group C which could not get proper advice received the treatment within two years. It took 10 years that all remaining cases of both groups received the treatment.
3. From the above, we considered that the difficulty of diagnosis of submucous cleft palate was due to the lack of suitable clinical systems.
4. Therefore, we would like to stress the necessity for cooperation between these clinics treating submucous cleft palate.
