BMJ 1995;311:1431 (25 November)

Letters

Trials of management are inevitably long

EDITOR,--In their editorial Tony Markus and Peter Ward Booth1 seek to discredit the work of most British surgeons working in cleft lip and palate on the basis of results in patients treated in the 1970s published by Shaw et al.2 They imply that no lessons have been learnt and state that the "functional repair" of Delaire produces vastly superior results. However, Delaire failed to publish his results, and Markus and Ward Booth merely reiterate his hypothesis. The almost identical technique of Malek produced as good but not better results than those achieved in Toronto by the Langenbeck technique when assessed by an independent authority.3

But let us suppose Delaire is right. It will be appreciated that one cannot take up every good idea that comes along when one is in the middle of a trial. In a career that started in 1969, with a caseload equivalent to that of Markus, . . . [Full text of this article]


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Relevant Article

Managing cleft lip and palate
Tony Markus and Peter Ward Booth
BMJ 1995 311: 765. [Extract] [Full Text]

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