Dr. Seilern

Most of what a surgeon does happens before an operation. Deciding whether surgery is appropriate at all, explaining why it might be, setting out what the alternatives are and what the evidence behind each one actually shows — that is the part of the work that determines whether a decision was a good one.

It is also the part that most often fails, and Dr. Seilern has spent years studying exactly how. He is first author on a systematic review of patient-centerd interventions for improving pain outcomes and reducing opioid-related risk after orthopaedic injury, and a contributor to studies of health literacy in orthopaedic patients — how much of what clinicians say is genuinely understood, and what happens when it is not.

More recently that question moved to where patients increasingly go first. A 2026 study in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, on which he is second author, tested how three large language models answered twenty common patient questions about orthobiologic injections. The answers were generally accurate. None of them were readable. Every model produced responses at a college reading level or above, all exceeding the standard recommended for patient education, and half of one model’s answers were judged to need more than minimal clarification. The authors concluded that AI answers should remain supplemental, with patient education directed by physicians.

That is the gap this site was built to address. Not more medical information — there is already more than anyone can read — but explanations of how decisions get made, written to be understood, with the evidence and its limitations stated plainly.

The published record is broader than sports medicine alone. It includes orthopaedic trauma, arthroplasty and frailty-based risk stratification, and foot and ankle surgery, much of it produced during residency and international training. That range is deliberate context rather than a claim of expertise in all of it: it is where the research training happened.

The sports medicine work is where the clinical focus now sits — ACL injury and reconstruction, shoulder and rotator cuff, elbow instability, and what determines a genuine return to sport rather than a nominal one.

Across all of it the same habit shows up: measuring things that are usually asserted. Whether a bruise pattern really predicts where a ligament tore. Whether a graft carries the infection risk it is assumed to. Whether patients understood the consent conversation. Whether an AI answer is readable.

He came to medicine out of the sport. Before medical school he played five seasons of NCAA Division II basketball at the University of South Carolina Aiken, as a guard, scoring his 1,000th career point in Sweet 16 play. He studied business administration there, was named twice to the Peach Belt Conference All-Academic team and twice to the Capital One Academic All-District first team, and carried a 3.514 grade point average in his junior year.

None of that is a clinical credential and it is not offered as one. What it changes is the vantage point. Much of his research asks what separates a nominal return to sport from a real one — whether a patient understood what they were told, whether a milestone measured anything a player would recognize. Those are questions that tend to occur to someone who has been on both sides of the examination table.