”I wanted to talked a little bit as an introduction about ear surgery and there’s really a few things that historically I’ve done with ears, both on the macro level at the University of California, San Francisco where I’m still in associate clinical professor, and then moving on into our practice here at the clinic.
On the small level, I regularly see ear deformities from the ear ring pulling through the lobule or the ear lobe on the ear, and they’re very simple fixes to these and there all some fixes that will actually last for a long time.
The problem with a torn earlobe or a hole that’s too large here is that if you simply repair the whole with a straight line, a little repair simply done in the office, a lot of times that ear ring will tear right back through is the scar is not as strong as the natural skin tissue, so what I’ll typically do with an earlobe tear or large earlobe hole is a small z-plasty repair which is a way of just generally removing the very small amount of the tissue in such a way that the line of the scar is perpendicular to where the ear in other words its horizontally oriented and that way, the ear ring won’t pull through. It’s a very simple procedure I’ll get into a description of it in just a few minutes.
The other major ear procedure that we do with frequency here at the clinic is of course ear’s that are outstanding, ones that are sticking out. There are two causes for that, one is the antihelix, a small bulge on this portion of the ear is poorly formed which makes the upper portion of the ear stick out.
The other is that the contable, the part of the ear that’s here by the base sticks out too far and when we fix that it’s called otoplasty. And again there are further descriptions that I’ll get into later but those are basically simple producers, the earlobe repair done in the office, the otoplasty is an outpatient procedure that we do commonly in our San Francisco Rejuvenation CenterTM, surgery center.
The otoplasty procedure can be done at all ages and really many times we’ll do children with that so that they’re not subject to ridicule or some sort of embarrassment and kids and parents work together for that. We want really, a total buy in for everybody to do outstanding ears in children and that’s the ears again that stick out. We’ll describe that in some detail later but I wanted to give you a small introduction on ear surgery.
The bigger procedures as I said before which is historically I’ve done quite a few of this. A team approach at the University is microtia where you’re born without ears and I haven’t been doing those but it’s worth the discussion and I’ll describe how we do those at the University and some detail and give some examples of ears that have been totally reconstructed. As always I’m very happy to discuss this with you at any time. Please send pictures, videos or written messages with question at DrMaas.com, we welcome your questions anytime and as always glad to be with you, Dr. Maas on looking your best.”
