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About

An international, English-language platform for ear surgery, otology and hearing preservation, written by a practising otologist with a background in academic and evidence-based medicine.

Wilko Grolman

Wilko Grolman is an otologist — an ear surgeon — whose clinical work is deliberately restricted to the ear: hearing loss and ear surgery, vestibular disorders, tinnitus and the Eustachian tube. Head and neck oncology, rhinology and general ENT are not practised.

He obtained his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam in 1998, on the physics of prosthetic voice rehabilitation, and was appointed professor of otorhinolaryngology and head of the department of ENT–head and neck surgery at the University Medical Center Utrecht from 1 January 2009; from 2011 to 2016 he also chaired the hospital’s Division of Surgical Specialties. From Utrecht he ran a programme of six randomised trial platforms in otology — bilateral cochlear implantation, single-sided deafness, day-case ear surgery, hearing protection — alongside laboratory work on stapes-surgery lasers and inner-ear imaging, and supervised more than twenty doctorates to completion. The record, audited against PubMed, OpenAlex and Google Scholar in August 2026, comprises around 270 indexed outputs (222 PubMed records), more than ten thousand citations and 49 systematic reviews. It is set out with its sources on orl.nl and via ORCID.

He now practises full-time in the south of France, at the Centre de Vertige of the Clinique Causse in Colombiers, near Béziers, with vestibular testing on site. Clinical consultations, including for patients from outside France, take place there; the practice website is grolman-orl.fr.

Alongside clinical work he is a founding member and President of LION, the Live International Otolaryngology Network, and technical manager of the Telemedicine ENT studio — the Utrecht studio that has been the technical backbone of LION’s international live-surgery broadcasts since 2006, covering broadcast engineering, information design and network work (orl.nl/technology).

What this site is for

ear-surgeon.com is an educational platform. It explains, in English and without commercial intent, how hearing works, what goes wrong in the middle ear, what surgery and devices can and cannot do, and how a decision about treatment should be reasoned — with the protection of existing hearing as a fixed principle. It is written for people facing a decision about their ears, for their families, and for the professionals who advise them.

It is not a substitute for a consultation and does not offer treatment online. Where it describes a procedure, that does not imply the procedure is personally performed; the site tries to say plainly which services are offered and which are not.

The four sites

Principles

Plain language for patients, technical detail for professionals, on the same page. Numbers with their uncertainty. Alternatives stated before recommendations. The better ear protected. And a preference, wherever the evidence allows, for the option that leaves the most doors open.

Contact

Through the contact form. There is no public email address; messages are answered by reply.

This page provides general educational information. It cannot replace an individual assessment, which depends on a full history, examination, audiometry and, where relevant, imaging. If you have sudden hearing loss, severe pain, facial weakness, severe dizziness or discharge with fever, seek medical care promptly.