The ObserverUK newsThis week we want to know all about ... Ear scaffolding
Prince Charles has them. So has Martin Clunes, the actor, and Charles Clarke, the politician. Sticking-out ears may be a joke to some people, but they are not so funny for those who suffer teasing and bullying and wisecracks about Mr Spock.
An estimated one in five Britons is affected by prominent ears, defined as projecting more than 17mm from the head. Yet each year the NHS carries out only 6,500 'corrective procedures'. Thousands suffer in silence, or spend around £2,500 on private surgery requiring a general anaesthetic. This is despite an up to 60 per cent chance of something going wrong, including cartilage damage, infection, keloid scarring or ear asymmetry.
But Norbert Kang, consultant plastic surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, north London, has designed the 'ear scaffold', the equivalent of a teeth brace. It is made of a strip of flexible metal just 1.5cm long, 4.5mm wide and 0.2mm thick which can be pre-formed to a desired shape before being inserted through an incision in the back of the ear. After six to eight weeks, the ear cartilage should remould itself to the new shape, allowing the scaffold to be removed. The metal, Nitinol, was first developed by US scientists for use on the nose cones of nuclear missiles.
'The frustration with the current technology drove me to try something better,' said Kang, who is supported by NHS Innovations East. He hopes the procedure will become available on the high street. 'People will walk in with prominent ears and walk out half an hour later with their ears pinned back, having only needed a local anaesthetic.'
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