Prominent ear correction

Mr Richards demonstrates a prominent ear correction procedure. He shows a picture of the ear before surgery and takes you through the steps of the operation. He then shows the dressings used to secure the ear and the appearance of the ear when these dressings are removed. For more information on Prominent Ear Correction or if you wish to schedule a FREE  consultation, please call us on 01844 214362.

Prominent Ear Correction

Hello. My name is Adrian Richards. I’m a consultant plastic and cosmetic surgeon, and today I’m going to be talking through an operation I did on this young lady with prominent ears on both sides. As you can see, the ear is a normal height, but the antihelical fold hasn’t formed very well.

Here I’m just demonstrating the antihelical fold. You can see that’s the fold that should be created in the ear, and when it doesn’t form, the ear becomes prominent. I’m just marking the antihelical fold here with the patient asleep, and the posterior line there is where I’m going to insert my stitches. Just also marking the skin on the back of the ear. The whole operation is done through an incision on the back of the ear with absolutely no incisions on the front of the ear.

Next stage is to insert local anaesthetic in the skin of the ear. Some people choose to have this operation done purely under local anaesthetic. Some people, as in this case, choose to have general anaesthetic to cover it. But it’s important anyway to have local anaesthetic for postoperative pain relief.

Here I am just removing the slither of skin with electrodiathermy which controls the bleeding. I only remove a very small slither of skin because it’s not the skin that controls the shape of the ear. It’s the underlying cartilage that we need to control.

So here I am just completing the skin excision with my electrocautery just to the end there.

The next stage is to create a fascial flap, and this is a flap I use to cover up the stitches. So here you can see I’m just removing a layer of tissue from the back of the cartilage, and here’s my flap that I’ve created, and I’m going to use this to cover the stitches.

This is a very important stage. I place a needle through the cartilage on both sides in four areas, and this shows me exactly where I want to place my stitches. Here I am placing a stitch. I use four non-absorbable stitches in the back of the ear. Here’s the middle one going in, and that just controls the ear and holds it back in place nicely.

Here are the four stitches placed, and you can see that’s controlled the antihelix quite well, and those are the positions of the stitches.

Next stage is to sew the skin up. Here I am doing that with an absorbable Vicryl stitch which doesn’t need to be removed.

So you can see the skin. The ear is nicely controlled here and nice and stable, and the skin on the back is sewn up neatly with that stitch that wont need to be removed.

Next stage is to just secure the ear with a tissue glue. So I place that between the skin and the ear, and the reason for this is just to hold the ear in place during the healing period. So I tend to put a bandage on. We put a bandage on nowadays for much less time than previously, and typically I’ll leave this on for three to four days.

So here we are before the operation. You can see poorly developed antihelical fold with a prominent ear on this side. Very similar on the left side as well.

This is it straight after the operation. This is five days following the operation when I’ve removed the dressing, and you can see with this posterior only technique very little bruising normally occurs, and a very good, good result with minimum downtime.

So thank you very much for watching this video. I hope you found it useful. If you’d like to contact us or talk about any procedure, please do so by either contacting us via the Aurora Clinics website or by phoning us. Thank you very much for listening, and we look forward to seeing you soon.