Here is what I think everyone needs to know about surgery of any kind: There is very little if any government regulation of surgery, nothing comparable to the regulation of drugs. There is no requirement for a surgical procedure to be reviewed for efficacy. If there are scholarly, scientific reviews of a particular surgical procedure, and the procedure is found to be ineffective, there is no legal requirement for a duly licensed surgeon to stop doing the procedure.
If a surgeon has recommended a procedure, you should ask him/her to identify the scientific studies, if any, that have evaluated the efficacy of the procedure, and then read them yourself, and satisfy yourself that the results of the study are valid.
As for the procedure that Achosid asks about – “tubes” in the eustacian tubes – i.e., a myringotomy – I do know of a patient who had the procedure several times, and they were ineffective, and the underlying disease resulted in a material loss of hearing.
An old-time internist I know gave a clinical but unscientific opinion about the case. He said that “in the old days, when we just yanked out the tonsils, we saw far fewer complications than the complications we see following the tube nonsense.”