Another Ear, Nose, and Throat Specialist gives his stunning response to Trig Palin's amazing "here today, gone tomorrow" ear deformity.

It has been ten days since I posted "A Tale of Two Babies by Sarah Palin".

As many of you know it received a lot of attention. A LOT of attention.

Some of it was very supportive and, simply put, amazed. And some was of a different type altogether.

The second type were the nay-sayers if you will. These people saw the same evidence that all of you saw.

But instead of being puzzled or amazed they were inspired to prove that I was incorrect.

Now the approach of these "nay-sayers" was very careful and, oh so much more reasonable than in times past.

None of this: "Gryphen you f**** a-hole, I'll shoot you dead." No, this bunch is way cooler than that. They can write. And the letters all sound pretty much the same: "I agree with you about the baby story but you're off base about the ear."

And then, the writer will go on to explain, with great sincerity and earnestness, using big medical words and terms, how that malformed ear we see on May 4th could somehow have morphed into the tiny perfection we see only four months later, on August 30th. In some cases, the writer personally knows a child whose ears were miraculously healed using ear molds. The phrasing in the various letters has often been quite similar and it occurred to me that many of the writers were either

1. The same person or
2. Getting their info from the same websites.

The goal is always the same: To get me off the ear story any way they can.

My guess is that they thought I would become so unsure that I would simply drop it and move onto another, safer approach to dealing with Sarah Palin's fake pregnancy.

Apparently these people do not spend much time visiting this blog, or they would know me better than that.

What I did instead is to seek out other professionals to get their opinions.

I decided to ask yet another physician his opinion on the ear last night, and wanted to ask him specifically about these "ear molds" numerous people have mentioned. To judge from my mail half of the kids in the U.S. have had ear molds. How common are they? How effective? And what about this "Stahl's Deformity," another term that's come up more times than I can count in the last ten days? Again from my mail it sounds like this is something that's pretty common, like chicken pox maybe.

This physician was an Ear, Nose, and Throat board-certified specialist. Most people will refer to these doctors as "ENTs," but the actual word is "otolaryngologist." He is trained to perform and has performed reconstructive surgery on ears. In the course of his more than 30 years in medical practice he has seen many cases of deformed ears on babies and children.

Here is what I learned:

1. Ear molding is a new procedure that has been developed in the past decade or so to give a few kids whose deformity is not severe "a chance" at avoiding surgery. This physician has never personally known of a case where it was attempted. It's rare, and not typically very successful. There are only a few large prominent pediatric plastic surgery centers that do it and it must be started almost immediately after birth, when the level of the mother's estrogen in the baby's blood is still high. I performed a quick Internet search and found one center that encourages the option in St Louis, and another in Texas. You can't pick up ear molds at the local pharmacy and we know for a fact that Palin did not travel anywhere with Trig in the first week of life. (No, she was too busy giving interviews and speaking to the Junior National Honor Society at Mears Middle School.) The molds must be worn continuously and adjusted weekly. They must be held in place by a headband or surgical tape, which we see no sign of in Sarah's baby on May 3rd or May 4th, when the child was allegedly over two weeks old. (Come on, people! Sarah Palin can't even keep Trig's glasses on.)

2. This board certified otolaryngologist had NEVER HEARD OF "Stahl's Deformity" by that name. When I showed him some pictures from the Internet he conceded that he had seen a few ears that looked like that but had not heard the phrase. He also pointed out after reading the websites I showed him that the ear of the baby at the shower did not have "Stahl's Deformity" in the first place, and that every single website says it's almost unheard of in Caucasians, being almost exclusively a deformity of Orientals (This last part came directly from the website on "Stahl's Deformity" and NOT from the doctor. Why they used it I have no idea.) This is a red herring pure and simple.

So my conclusion? Desperate to defend Queen Sarah, a few critics have frantically googled anything possible to explain the difference between the two ears over a four month time frame. Thanks to the Internet they've managed to come up with a couple plausible sounding explanations using big medical words. And then, because some possible explanation can be found, no matter how remote, they use the old fall back that's been applied to so many of the aspects of Sarah's pregnancy and birth: If a "one in a million" chance can be identified that could POSSIBLY explain [whatever it is that we're trying to explain that day] then Sarah MUST be given the benefit of the doubt and that explanation MUST be assumed to be true.

Oh, and as far as fancy medical terms and big words go? I should probably tell you his very first reaction to being shown the pictures in the first place. When asked specifically if a treatment or procedure or molding or, well, anything at all, could change the May 4th right ear into the August 30th right ear, he looked surprised that anyone would even ask the question and responded:

"No way. No how. You can't shine shit."

(I just LOVE medical lingo, don't you?)

For those who have forgotten just how damaged this baby's ear was, let me refresh your memory with this closeup.

This precious child's ear did NOT heal itself in four months! It also was not reformed through the use of a "ear molds". In fact I would bet almost anything that it looks very much like this even now, almost two years later.

Now I am going to give some of the people who left comments or e-mailed me the benefit of the doubt. It is within the realm of possibilities that some of you were genuinely concerned that I was mistaken or that I had overlooked some other explanation. And, if true, I apologize for lumping you in with the others who were clearly working overtime to get me off of this story.

Remember, I DID spend ten months preparing. Quite a bit of that time was spent doing research, and I am by no means finished yet. I am still awaiting opinions from other experts, some in the medical field, some not, that I will post at a later time. And like I mentioned earlier if any credentialed journalists wants to speak to my experts just e-mail me and we will make that happen. Or they could do what some other journalists I have spoken to are already doing, and simply find their own experts and ask them the same questions that I posed to mine.

I have little doubt they will reach the same conclusion that I have reached. That then Governor Sarah Palin passed off more than one baby as "Trig Paxson Van Palin".

And I further believe that once we get to the bottom of this deception we will also get to the bottom of the controversy known as"babygate".