Dr. Immerman’s Research is Making a Difference

In 2021 Dr. Immerman published an article titled “The Bascom Cleft Lift as a Solution for All Presentations of Pilonidal Disease”. This was the first study proposing that any kind of pilonidal problem, ranging from small symptomatic pits, to recurrent sinuses, to large perianal wounds – can be successfully treated with the cleft lift procedure. Of course, this is controversial, and many surgeons prefer to try other modalities first. However, in this article 700 patients are followed and Dr. Immerman demonstrates an overall success rate of 96.6%. This is one of the largest series of cleft lift patients reported, and some of the best results.

One of the advantages of publishing open-source medical articles is that they are available to anyone on the internet. The goal of publishing studies like this is to educate both the public and physicians about the success of this procedure. Another advantage, is that we can track how many times the article is viewed. The article can be found on both the Cureus Journal of Medical Science website (published by the prestigious Springer Nature company), and also on PubMed, which is a free, publicly available search tool maintained by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for biomedical and life sciences literature. As of this date, this article has been read over 45,000 times!

As of spring 2025 Dr. Immerman has performed the cleft lift operation on well over 1400 patients, and the results are basically the same as in the 700 patient study. Hopefully, this information will help other surgeons decide to learn the cleft lift operation, and increase the level of excellence in pilonidal care throughout the world.