Clinical and research areas

1. 01

   Knee and ACL

   Anterior cruciate ligament injury and reconstruction, including graft choice, injury mechanism, and reconstruction in athletes who are still growing.

   The knee is where most of Dr. Seilern’s published sports medicine work sits. That work spans how the ligament actually fails during non-contact injuries, what the pattern of bone bruising on MRI reveals about the mechanism, and outcomes after reconstruction using all-soft-tissue quadriceps tendon autograft.

   It includes reconstruction in skeletally immature athletes, where the presence of open growth plates changes the technique and the timing of the decision.

   6 related publications

2. 02

   Shoulder

   Rotator cuff pathology, deltoid function and shoulder biomechanics, including quantitative assessment of muscle stiffness.

   Published work here includes a first-authored reliability study of dynamic deltoid stiffness measured with shear wave elastography, and a contribution to an Instructional Course Lecture on the treatment of rotator cuff tears from partial-thickness through to irreparable.

   An Instructional Course Lecture is teaching material written for other surgeons, which makes it a particularly direct source on how these decisions are actually weighed.

   3 related publications

3. 03

   Sports injuries

   Ligament and tendon injury across the knee, shoulder and elbow, in athletes from recreational through to competitive.

   Alongside the knee and shoulder, the published record includes elbow instability and dislocation — including a direct comparison of surgical and non-surgical treatment of simple elbow dislocations — and emerging work on ulnar collateral ligament injury in throwing athletes.

   12 related publications

4. 04

   Return to sport

   What actually determines a return to sport after injury and surgery — and what "returning" is taken to mean.

   Return to sport is reported constantly and defined inconsistently. Returning to training, returning to competition, and returning to the level you played before an injury are three different outcomes, and studies that report one are often read as though they reported another.

   Several of Dr. Seilern’s published studies report return to sport as a primary outcome, including in skeletally immature athletes and after simple elbow dislocation.

   9 related publications

5. 05

   Surgical decision-making

   How treatment decisions are made, how well patients understand them, and what changes when the explanation improves.

   This is the thread running through the rest of the work. Dr. Seilern has first-authored peer-reviewed research on patient-centerd interventions for pain and opioid-related risk, and contributed to studies of health literacy in orthopaedic patients — how much of what clinicians say is actually understood.

   More recently that has extended to whether AI-generated answers to orthopaedic patient questions are accurate and readable at a level patients can use.

   6 related publications

Dr. Seilern is completing subspecialty fellowship training in orthopaedic sports medicine. This site is a professional and educational resource. It is not a clinical practice and is not accepting patients.