Lifestyle Lift® Foundation

The Lifestyle Lift® Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping children with disfiguring hemangioma birth defects. Hemangioma is a ball- or mat-shaped benign tumor formed by a collection of excess blood vessels. Because blood vessel cells are usually transparent in thin, smooth muscle cells, hemangiomas are usually the color of the blood that runs through them.

With the surgical excision of proliferating hemangiomas comes the risk of hemorrhage. Lifestyle Lift® utilizes new advancements in surgical instruments to cauterize while cutting, lessening that risk. Benefits of early excision include:

• saving life
  
• saving vision
  
• decreasing the psychosocial effects of disfigurement
  
• naturally expanded skin to aid in primary closure
  
• the ability to use an avascular tissue plane surrounding actively growing hemangiomas
  

The children we help cannot afford treatment, and/or do not have access to treatment in their communities. The Lifestyle Lift® Foundation believes a healthy child is a happy child, and all our efforts are directed towards that end.

Lifestyle Lift® Sponsors the Healing the Children Foundation

Healing the Children Foundation's mission is to restore health to the impoverished children of the world through donated medical services. Healing the Children began with one child, Lori Jo Embleton, a Korean infant adopted by Cris and Gary Embleton of Spokane, Washington. Lori Jo died of a condition that could have been cured if the medicine she needed had been available in her native country.

After Lori Jo’s death, Cris put her grief to work. She arranged for a child from Guatemala to have donated, life-saving heart surgery. From that one little miracle, Healing the Children grew Today, thousands of children around the world are alive and well because Healing the Children is working on their behalf.

Ending Isolation for the World’s Children

2005 Ecuador mission trip  Dr. Coleman marking for a cleft lip repair

You’ve seen how Lifestyle Lift® doctors transform the lives of their clients, but consider how they transform the lives of children across the globe through their humanitarian efforts. Many of our doctors make medical mission trips to South America, Southeast Asia and Africa year after year.

For example, Dr. John R. Coleman Jr. of Atlanta will be taking his fifth trip with Kidejapa, an Atlanta-based non-profit organization that has arranged 11 surgical mission trips to help the children of Ecuador.

“All of the surgeries that I perform are related to craniofacial abnormalities … mostly cleft lip and cleft palate,” Coleman explains. “This year, we will be taking two surgical techs, two nurses, two anesthesiologists and a student on the trip.”

Typically, mission teams operate from 12 to 16 hours a day and must transport everything they’ll need with them – staff, supplies, instruments, bandages and even medications. All surgeries are provided free of charge to the patients, and, often, the teams pay for their own trips.

Still, these are mild hardships compared to the lives of their young patients, whose birth defects like cleft lip, cleft palate and any other abnormal facial features often mean blame and banishment.

Thanks to Coleman and his peers, however, these children’s extraordinary lives are transformed into what they always wanted: a normal life.

	2004 Ecuador Mission Trip Drs. Coleman and Deutch with Ecuadorian nurses
	2004 Ecuador Mission Trip waiting room for screening