Ear Pinning Surgery Explained

Dr. Travis Stork: Drew, before you're very passionate about not doing plastic surgery on young kids for things like liposuction.

Dr. Drew Ordon: Correct. But this is really a congenital deformity. In most cases, not really that the ears are too big, it's that the fold in the ear never happens. So you don't have this natural crease of your ear and here typically, you have too much cartilage in this part of your ear which causes your ears to stick out. So eight to ten is the time to do it on kids and I want to give you little idea of how I do this.

This is one of the things I like doing the best, because it truly is sculpting an ear. I make an incision back of the ear. First step is I actually remove a little bit of skin which will inset that ear. What I then do is I remove a little section of the extra cartilage right in here that's pushing the ear out.

Finally, I put in a row of sutures. This is all done from the back. The only cut is at the back of the ear. I put a row of like five to six sutures to create that bend in the cartilage that I mentioned. This is called autoplasty or correction of the prominent ear can be done under local anesthesia or light general anesthesia. Your head is wrapped up for about a week and that shows you of how we can inset that ear.


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