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.

Jean Fouts, RN, BSN, has been working with K. Donald Shelbourne, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Shelbourne Knee Center, for 36 years. They met during Fouts’ first job out of nursing school as a surgical nurse at IU Health Methodist Hospital. At that time, Dr. Shelbourne was an orthopedic surgeon at the Methodist Sports Medicine Center.

Degenerative meniscus tears, part of the aging process, are the most common reason for knee arthroscopy because many primary care physicians and orthopedic surgeons believe that meniscus tears always require surgery. “This is not the case,” says Rodney Benner, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Shelbourne Knee Center. “Many degenerative meniscus tears will get better without surgery.

Patients who re-tear their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and require revision surgery usually have more difficulty recovering and a lower return to sport rate than primary ACL revision patients. That’s not what happened for revision ACL patients at the Shelbourne Knee Center. “We observed that our patients did better because we had to take the tendon from the other knee,” says K. Donald Shelbourne, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Shelbourne Knee Center.

In an era where the average person has 12 jobs in his/her lifetime,⁽¹⁾ and stays at each job for about 4 years,⁽²⁾ four members of the Shelbourne Knee Center Team have been working with K. Donald Shelbourne, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Shelbourne Knee Center, for 30+ years. Denise Bawel started working with Dr.

When it comes to total knee arthroplasty (TKA), the tried and true is usually better than innovations like robotic-assisted surgery, computer navigation, patient-specific cutting blocks and custom implants.  

After anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction, limitations in range of motion (ROM) reduce the ability of patients to return to sports and function normally, and increase symptoms such as pain. Even a small loss of knee extension—3° to 5°—has a negative impact,¹ according to groundbreaking research conducted at Shelbourne Knee Center.

When K. Donald Shelbourne, MD, cares for athletes with a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), he understands what they’re going through—he tore his ACL while an All-American football player studying chemistry at Wabash College. Dr. Shelbourne was also captain of the wrestling team and winner of an NCAA Post Graduate Scholarship in wrestling.