Quote:
Originally Posted by supertac
The doctor lanced the front of his ear with a scalpel and the sucked and scraped all of the blood and puss out of the ear. He then stitched the ear back up using cotton rolls (he put one cotton roll on back, and one on front and then stitched around them to make an improvised compression bandage). While this is certainly an imaginative way to treat cauliflower ear, it is most definitely not the best.
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The above is ignorant and wrong. What you describe is, in fact, the
exact way that a well informed doctor will treat cauliflower ear. The procedure is known as bolstering, and is the quickest and most effective way to insure that the drained ear does not refill. Syringes and compression bandages are not nearly as effective in allowing the skin and cartilage to re-attach. While I'm at it, when an ear is bolstered, the stitching is not around your ear, it's through it. 2-3 stitches are placed through the ear to compress the skin to the cartilage through the cotton bolster pads.
I've drained my own ear with a syringe once, which I had to do multiple times, and kept refilling, over the course of 10 days. I've also had my ears bolstered twice, those healed in 4 days. The doctor who did the bolsters in both cases is a board certified Plastic surgery and Ear, Nose and Throat guy. I'll assume he's more familiar with standards of care for this injury than you are.
Now I wear headgear, all the time.