Otolaryngologists Say Pickleball, an Increasingly Popular Sport, Helps Them Thrive in Their Specialty

by Cheryl Alkon •

Dr. White, who grew up playing basketball at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division II school, and played baseball all throughout high school at Rhinelander High School in Rhinelander, Wis., said that this is an exaggeration. “He probably wins 75 percent of the games. My advantage is that I’m bigger; I’m 6-foot 7 inches, and he’s 5-foot 10 inches, so I have a bit of an advantage with height. I can crowd the net on him.

At the Medical College of Wisconsin, Dr. White had first considered orthopedics as a specialty but ultimately preferred otolaryngology. “I went into otolaryngology because I enjoyed that focus—there’s a lack of cookie-cutter procedures in the specialty as opposed to, say, orthopedics, where there are direct steps for each procedure. With otolaryngology, you find a landmark, and then find this thing that you should not cut. It’s more artistic and free flowing.”

Pickleball has a special appeal for Dr. White as a physician. “Playing pickle has helped me to be a better doctor through knowing when to move on when I make a mistake,” Dr. White added. “You have to move on to the next shot because there isn’t much time to dwell on mistakes in either field. Pretty much every surgery we do, there’s a nerve or a structure that you must be delicate around.

A Restorative Game

Dr. Wessinger, who grew up with chronic sinus issues and was in and out of otolaryngology offices, chose the specialty because it was a field defined by anatomic regions rather than a particular system. “We get to operate on bone, soft tissue, nerves, and vasculature—really any pathology in the head or the neck aside from the brain or the eye,” he said.

Playing pickleball has helped me to be a better doctor through knowing when to move on when I make a mistake. You have to move on to the next shot because there isn’t much time to dwell on mistakes in either field. —Shane White, MD

Pickleball has also helped Dr. Wessinger with the practice of medicine. “In the surgical field, you can feel good about a strength that you have,” he said. “Maybe you’re very good at a certain surgery, like a tonsillectomy, but you see someone do it very differently, or a variation of what you are doing. Then, you can pick and choose what you liked from the other surgeon’s technique and how you’ll do the surgery next. That can also happen with seeing someone else hit a serve differently than I do,” he said.