Following simultaneous anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction and repair or removal of a locked bucket-handle meniscus tear, patients were having difficulty regaining full range of motion (ROM). “After surgery, the patient had a stable knee, but it was stiff and not functional,” says K. Donald Shelbourne, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Shelbourne Knee Center.

Jonathan Fernandes had never heard of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) until he tore his while practicing Jigo Tensin Ryu Jujutsu in September 2018. The 32-year-old mathematician at the University of Maryland is a 2nd degree black belt in this martial art. He’s also an avid Argentine tango dancer, runner, swimmer, and bicyclist.

Patellofemoral dislocation accounts for less than 3% of knee injuries seen by most orthopedic surgeons. Evaluation of patellofemoral dislocation, and determining whether surgical or non-surgical management would be optimal for a particular patient, is difficult due to anatomical complexity and challenges in determining the cause of the problem.

For more than 38 years, Shelbourne Knee Center has been studying patient outcomes and factors related to those outcomes. Now Shelbourne Knee Center has a new tool in its research arsenal: the SKC dashboard.

Many patients with knee osteoarthritis are told that they should live with the pain until it becomes unbearable, and then have total knee arthroplasty (TKA). At Shelbourne Knee Center, these are not the only choices.

Lee Linenberg has known K. Donald Shelbourne, MD, for 45 years and has been working with him for 31 years. Linenberg met Dr. Shelbourne, an orthopedic surgeon at Shelbourne Knee Center, in 1975, when her husband played rugby with him. Ten years later, Linenberg became one his patients. Three years after that, she became his clinical assistant.

A patellar tendon rupture is a disabling injury that prevents the patient from achieving full knee extension. This rare injury, occurring in less than 0.5% of the population annually, has two main causes:

As a patient at Shelbourne Knee Center, Jacob Bailey saw first-hand how research enabled orthopedic surgeon K. Donald Shelbourne, MD, to provide optimal treatment for his torn ACL and meniscus and answer his questions about return to competitive swimming.