How pingpong is helping New Yorkers beat Parkinsons disease: Cant get enough

NYU economics professor Bill Easterly, a highly respected expert in foreign aid, global poverty and development in Africa, can add a novel title to his lengthy resume — pingpong player extraordinaire.Easterly, 67, picked up the unusual skill as a way to cope with Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that can cause tremors, slow movement and depression.“I just can’t get enough of it,” Easterly told The Post.“When I play pingpong, I just feel my brain come alive.”There’s no cure for Parkinson’s — but Easterly and others have found healing by playing several times a week at SPIN New York Flatiron as part of PingPongParkinson.The nonprofit has been a smashing success with over 300 chapters in 25 countries and an inaugural New York Open tournament held earlier this month.Participants rave that the rhythmic movements and social interaction have boosted their mood and helped delay the progression of their Parkinson’s symptoms.“I don’t know if it’s because of the pingpong or not, but I started with a tremor in my right hand, which I now don’t have,” said Joan Greenberg, 77, a retired writer and mosaic artist who now half-jokes that she’s an elite NYC elder athlete.One of the appeals of pingpong, Greenberg told The Post, is that she can track her improvement.

And being in PingPongParkinson makes it easy to share her experience of being diagnosed in 2020 and hear from others.“It’s created a social circle of people who are in the same situation,” she said.“Not only that we have Parkinson’s, but we’re the type of people who want to do something proactive for ourselves.”PingPongParkinson is the brainchild of Croatian-American musician Nenad Bach, who has performed with Bono and Luciano Pavarotti and rocked Woodstock ’94 with “Can We Go Higher?”He was diagnosed in 2010, with his symptoms getting so bad that he could no longer play guitar to a syncopated beat.“I had to stop performing publicly,” Bach, 7...