Baseball is about hot dogs, peanuts, and Cracker Jack. It’s about swings and strikes. It’s about pitching, hitting, and catching as well as family, friendship, and fandom. It’s about winning on the best days and losing on the worst.
Unfortunately, sometimes it’s also about strains, sprains, concussions, and contusions. On those occasions, the most valuable players aren’t the athletes playing the game but the medical professionals entrusted with their treatment.
Once a year, Joaquin Santos, MD, is among those professionals. A retired internist who is now a member of the physician faculty at the Kansas College of Osteopathic Medicine, he’s been attending the NCAA Men’s College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, for more than 35 years as a member of its sports medicine staff.
“The College World Series is the national championship for college baseball,” says Dr. Santos, whose first College World Series was in 1988 when he was team physician for the Wichita State Shockers Division I men’s baseball team. “It’s a tradition for college baseball. Every college player is hopeful that he will get to play at least once in the College World Series.”
Baseball players aren’t the only ones who aspire to attend the College World Series. Medical students also dream of the dugouts, according to Dr. Santos, who took four KansasCOM students with him to Omaha for the first time in 2023. The experience was so enriching that he brought four more students with him to this year’s tournament, which took place June 14-24 at Charles Schwab Field Omaha.
While players were busy scoring runs, the students were racking up wins of their own in the form of hands-on professional experience that enhanced their learning, expanded their horizons, and exposed new possibilities for doctors of osteopathic medicine in sports and athletics.
A Day to Remember
KansasCOM students were so enthused about attending this year’s College World Series that Dr. Santos had to hold a lottery to fill the four available slots. Each of the chosen students got to spend one memorable day working alongside Dr. Santos and his colleagues during the tournament.
“The students have had great experiences,” Dr. Santos says. “I have them work with the entire team, including the athletic trainers, the paramedics, the nurses, as well as the physicians on staff for each of the games for the day that they are assigned. I want them to know how to prepare for a big national event … [and] how the medical staff prepares for any of the potential problems that might occur.”
Those potential problems were on full display for sports fans in January 2023, when 24-year-old Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed during a televised football game. He’d suffered a near-fatal cardiac arrest after making a tackle and was resuscitated by responding paramedics and physicians, the NFL reported at the time.
“Fortunately, we’ve never had that happen at the College World Series,” explains Dr. Santos, “but we’ve had some rather serious injuries as well as illness that the students have had an opportunity to see.”
Dr. Santos says students shadowing medical staff have learned how EMTs transport injured players to ambulances and hospitals during emergencies, how nurses administer IV fluids to dehydrated players and umpires, and how on-site fluoroscopy (X-rays and ultrasounds, for example) can help trainers and physicians diagnose broken bones and torn muscles in real time.
Among the most memorable patients at this year’s event were two home-plate umpires who sustained head injuries after getting hit in the head with baseballs. “One of them had a significant concussion after having had a previous concussion about three months ago,” Dr. Santos recalls. “We are looking very carefully at closed head injuries, or concussions, now because of the long-term effects … So, we spent a lot of time talking about that.”
DOs: ‘The World Is Their Oyster’
Omaha in June is usually hot and humid, and students spend hours on their feet standing on hard concrete in crowded dugouts. For those lucky enough to attend the College World Series, however, the experience is as invaluable and eye-opening as it is sweaty and exhausting, suggests Dr. Santos, who says the immersive learning students get in Omaha perfectly complements KansasCOM’s hands-on approach to medical education.
“We absolutely want to show them real-world experiences, and this is one that they probably won’t get when they’re in the hospital or when they’re in someone’s clinic during their third and fourth years of medical school,” explains Dr. Santos, who says many students will end up practicing medicine in small towns that need sports medicine practitioners. “Particularly if they’re going to a smaller town where they may not even have athletic trainers available, the town doctor usually is the caregiver for the sports [teams] in their community.”
That’s a revelation for many aspiring doctors of osteopathic medicine, who may not realize that sports medicine is a career path that’s open to them. “All primary care doctors—including internal medicine physicians like myself, family medicine doctors, emergency room doctors, pediatricians, and physical medicine and rehabilitation trained physicians—can do the fellowship for primary care sports medicine, which is a one-year fellowship after their residency,” Dr. Santos says. “When I started, there were very few programs. Now, most larger cities and universities have primary care sports medicine fellowships available.”
In that way, the College World Series isn’t just about watching baseball, or even caring for ill and injured players, coaches, and umpires. For the eight KansasCOM students who have traveled to Omaha with Dr. Santos so far, and for the many peers who heard their tales afterward, it’s about forging prolific and prosperous futures for osteopathic physicians and the patients they’ll eventually serve.
“By giving them an opportunity to experience things they could never experience in a hospital or clinic, it’s my hope that students will realize they can practice medicine wherever they want,” Dr. Santos says. “The world is their oyster.”