Video Transcription
I’m Dr. Jeffrey Popp, cosmetic surgeon here in Omaha, Nebraska. Been doing this for over 20 years. We are going to talk about otoplasty, aka ear pinning, people with prominent ears. So I’m going to start with a little description of the procedure and how it applies.
Otoplasty (Ear Pinning) Procedure
The easiest way to look at ears or prominent ears is two things, and they all basically have to do with the cartilage in the ear. Really nothing about prominent ears has to do with the skin, it’s all the cartilage skeleton, which creates the form of the ear. And we all know that cartilage is rigid, yet bendable. So there are three possibilities that people can have in terms of having a prominent ear. One is the cartilage that forms this cup in here, or bowl can be overgrown, or we call it conchal. The bowl is called the conchal bowl. And that bowl can be hypertrophy or overgrown, which means the entire ear will come away from the side of the head. So that’s, that’s problem one called conchal cartilage bowl hypertrophy.
The other has to do with the top of the ear. This is the helix. And this little crease or furrow, right here’s called the antihelical fold. And in some people, that fold doesn’t exist. So what happens is the top of the ear comes out. So that’s the second problem, is loss of the antihelical fold. So if you put those two problems together, you can have one problem. The other problem, or both problems. And I would say the vast majority of people I see, they almost all have conchal bowl hypertrophy, so the years pushed out. And some have to a varying degree of loss of the antihelical fold.
So the basic crux of otoplasty is to reduce the overgrowth of the hypertrophy of that cartilage, to set the ear back closer to the head, and if need be, recreate that antihelical fold so the tip of the ear is folded inward and not out.
This particular problem, we’ll just call it prominent ears, there is no nonsurgical alternative. We had talked at another time about neck liposuction, I’ll interject that here because there are non-surgical options for that. But there are no non-surgical options for prominent ears, it’s either surgery or nothing.
Cost of Otoplasty (Ear Pinning)
So a good question, at the beginning of anybody’s adventure in terms of fixing or potentially fixing prominent ears, has to do with cost. And in this part of the country, in the Midwest, you’re looking probably between 4 and 8,000 dollars. That would be the range. The difference can be, in part, can be due to how the particular surgeon divides that up. Because in the surgery you have, in this particular surgery, in all surgeries, you have to pay the surgeon, you have to pay the surgery center, you have to pay anesthesia, maybe nurses, lab, various things like that. And we also throw the office visits after surgery in there. So when we quote a price it’s for everything. It includes my fee for both ears. Since you have two ears, sometimes people will be a little tricky and they’ll say, well, the cost is only like $1,500, but that’s just for one ear and that’s just for that doctor’s fee.
So, it’s like a lot of things when you go out to buy stuff, sometimes you see the number but that’s not everything. I’m amazed at how many things are now added on. I think cars are a good example where you know, think, well, but you have to pay extra for this package and extra for that package and pretty soon the $35,000 car is now $40,000 or more. I mean, you can do that with this. But in this practice, in my practice, the fee includes everything. That’s it to the penny.
So in the Midwest about $4,000 to $8,000, that includes everything. My fee for both ears, anesthesia, nurses, equipment, surgery center charges, all your visits for as long as we need to see you. Obviously, if you go to either coast where life is more expensive, you’re going to pay a lot more.
