As a child, Scott Hoffinger, MD, liked to tinker, taking clock radios and other mechanical devices apart and putting them back together. He usually got all the pieces back in place.

This innate interest in mechanics eventually grew to include body mechanics and, at the urging of his family, he set off to a combined six-year undergraduate/medical school program at the University of Michigan. At the end of his freshman year, he found himself observing surgeries in an operating room. It was the moment his future crystallized.

“I thought it was the greatest thing in entire world, like fixing clock radios,” he recalled. “It involved doing everything I wanted to do: working with my hands, using my brain, thinking hard. It’s all up to you, the surgeon. You have ability to make it come out perfect, it can be OK, or you can make it perfect.

Giving his all
Making things perfect and giving his all are recurring themes in Dr. Hoffinger’s life.

“I don’t like to fail,” he admitted. “I don’t like to not absolutely put everything I have into it.”

Giving his all was tested when a college buddy of his—“a much bigger buddy”— suggested playing rugby.

“I said ‘What’s rugby?’”

He soon found out.

“We’d get pounded. You’d have to dust yourself off and get right back up.”
It’s all part of a challenge: “Everything is a personal challenge to try and master,” he acknowledged.

That rugby challenge
When Dr. Hoffinger got to the medical school part of his undergraduate training, and he saw how hard surgeons worked, it became “like that rugby challenge” to him.

“I wanted to work as hard as these guys. So the line was: Work harder than everybody else, get up earlier than everybody else, and still look better in the morning. It’s the Marines: You do more by 8 a.m. than most people do all day.”

The hard work paid off: when Dr. Hoffinger finished his specialty training in Orthopedics, he became the youngest board certified orthopedist in the country.

Residency and pediatrics
Dr. Hoffinger left Michigan for a residency at Yale University Medical Center. He later trained as a surgeon and orthopedist there as well. While rotating through a children’s hospital in Connecticut, he fell in love with pediatrics.

“I was having a great time doing orthopedics. I liked the meticulous nature of it, but once I started playing with the kids, things changed. With kids, you can do big (orthopedic) things, you can do little (orthopedic) things; fine micro things, gross hit-it-with-a-mallet-and-hammer things, sports things, spine and neuromuscular things. The fact that I could still do orthopedics and play with the kids, that was great.

“I used to get in trouble playing with kids,” he remembered. “I cast all the stuffed animals in hospital one weekend, 150 of them.”

Positive outcomes
Dr. Hoffinger appreciates the positive outcomes he sees in orthopedics.

“It’s such a positive feeling, people getting back to their full lives, getting back to recreation, getting back to doing things they’ve wanted to do, from older folks who got an artificial joint who want to feel good taking their walk, to kids who just want to get back on their bikes.”

“Things are rarely terribly depressing; they’re here because you can do things for them. Yeah, their foot may not work, but I can transfer muscles and then it will work much better. When people leave with hope, it’s a great place to be. The hardest thing is to tell people there’s nothing we can do.”

After moving to Seattle and practicing there for four years, Dr. Hoffinger joined Children’s Hospital Oakland as the chief of Orthopedics. “I was hired as chief,” he said. “But I was the chief and the Indian.”

It was a small program, but he saw the opportunities it presented.

“I liked the idea that you could create your own destiny, there was a need, a real need.”

The program has grown, in staff, locations and in services. It now includes the Sports Medicine Center for Young Athletes, Northern California’s first sports medicine center to focus exclusively on young athletes. Children’s reputation for excellence in orthopedics has also grown.

“I tell my staff,” Dr. Hoffinger recounted, “our job is not just to get through the day, our job is to be excellent.”

Though Dr. Hoffinger has worked with his share of young athletes, some who have gone on to Olympic and professional glory, it’s the kids that keep inspiring him.

“Kids are the great equalizers; a kid is a kid. With our practice here, we have inner city kids and they have orthopedic problems or a broken bone and they are absolutely identical in hope and desires with a 6-year-old kid from Piedmont or Orinda. They are complete open books, they all want the same thing.”

Dr. Hoffinger sees his life as “a storybook.”

“We have a great department, we have the best people in the hospital, an office manager who wakes up at night worrying about things like I do, she’s absolutely on the ball and a nursing team that’s been together for all of my 15 years. We work like clockwork, know how things are going to be…I have great medical partners, we’re going great guns, trying to have a great time doing what we do.”

In the last two years, having a “great time doing what we do” has included Dr. Hoffinger’s continuing role on the TLC-TV reality TV show, Little People, Big World, having been adopted as the family orthopedist by the Roloffs, the show’s stars.