Form & Function Orthopaedics

Form & Function Orthopaedics Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Form & Function Orthopaedics, Surgeon, 9555 SW Barnes Road, Suite 275, Portland, OR.

Joint preservation for shoulders and knees

Orthopaedic surgery & regenerative care for active adults

Guided by the JointSpanMD™ approach

Founded by Dr. Nancy Yen Shipley

Portland, OR

04/11/2026

Orthopaedics needed more jazz hands. You're welcome. 🙌🏼

Turns out showing up fully yourself is the most radical thing you can do in a room that wasn't built for you. Whether it's the OR or a stage in Thailand, unbothered looks good on everyone.

If nobody told you today - your enthusiasm is not a liability. It is your superpower.

Follow for more of this energy (and actual joint preservation medicine 🦴✨)

04/11/2026

The Artemis II crew just returned from the farthest point any human has ever traveled from Earth. The average age of the Apollo astronauts who went to the Moon was 38. The average age of the Artemis II crew? 48.8. Over a decade older.

Christina Koch became the first woman, Victor Glover the first person of color, Jeremy Hansen the first non-US citizen, and Reid Wiseman the oldest person ever to travel beyond low Earth orbit.

This is what midlife looks like when you invest in your body and your longevity.

To get selected as an astronaut you need a graduate degree, years of technical mastery, often a military career, and then years of elite physical and mental training. These are not passive people waiting to feel better. They are the most rigorously prepared humans on the planet.

Generation X was told our best years were behind us. The Artemis II crew just proved that wrong from 252,000 miles away.

Your joints. Your bones. Your strength. Your stamina. These are the infrastructure of everything you want to do in the next 30 years. The science of musculoskeletal longevity is not just for elite athletes. It is for every person who refuses to slow down.

What would you do with a body that was built to go the distance?

Follow for more on joint health, longevity, and what midlife can actually look like.

04/10/2026

Stanford published a cartilage study and the internet lost its mind.

I get it. The headline was irresistible. “End to osteoarthritis?” Sign everyone up.

Here’s what’s actually true:

The science is real and it’s exciting. Researchers identified an enzyme that shuts down your cartilage’s repair signal as you age. Block the enzyme, the signal comes back, cartilage regenerates in the lab.

Here’s what the headline skipped:
This was tested on tissue removed during knee replacements. Not in a living joint. Not in a human body. Not in a clinical trial. A lab dish and a living joint are completely different environments, and we have seen promising therapies fail that transition more times than I can count.

Also, osteoarthritis isn’t just a cartilage problem. By the time most people are in enough pain to seek help, the bone underneath has already changed. You can’t just fix one piece of a broken system.

Where it DOES get genuinely exciting: early interception. If we catch joint degeneration before the damage becomes structural, this mechanism could be the key to stopping arthritis before it starts. That is a real paradigm shift. Just not today.

What IS available today: PRP, regenerative biologics, cartilage restoration procedures, and a preservation-first approach that treats your joint before it becomes a replacement conversation. That’s what we do every day at Form and Function Orthopaedics in Portland.

If you’re ready to take your joint health seriously right now, start with my free guide, “10 Steps to Lifelong Vitality,” at f2ortho.com. And if you want to work with us directly, visit f2ortho.com to learn more or request a consultation.
This is the kind of medicine I believe in. Not hype. Not waiting. Real options, right now, with an eye on what’s coming next.

Everything I build is grounded in the belief that midlife adults deserve better care and better information. You can age...
04/08/2026

Everything I build is grounded in the belief that midlife adults deserve better care and better information. You can age with more strength, clarity, and confidence when you have the right tools.

My work blends orthopaedics, regenerative medicine, hormone-aware care, and longevity science so people can live in bodies that support their goals, not limit them.

Start with my free guide, “10 Steps to Lifelong Vitality,” at f2ortho.com.

04/07/2026

Women are 2 to 5 times more likely than men to tear their ACL.

For a long time we blamed anatomy. Hip width. Q angle. Notch size. Those things are real. But the hormonal picture is more specific than most sports medicine has been willing to engage with.

A 2026 narrative review in Nutrients is helping reframe how we think about this. It argues that symptoms — fatigue, poor sleep, pain, gut issues — may drive injury risk just as powerfully as any specific hormonal phase. Because when your body is running on empty and movement quality suffers, that is when things tear.

But here is where I push further.

Around ovulation, estrogen peaks and a hormone called relaxin surges. Relaxin has receptors specifically on female ACLs — not male ACLs. It triggers collagen-degrading enzymes and suppresses collagen production at a tissue level. That is a mechanism, not a theory. Symptoms matter AND hormonal phase has real biological effects on your connective tissue. Those are not competing ideas. They belong together.

Now here is what almost nobody is researching.
All of this work focuses primarily on younger menstruating athletes. The perimenopausal woman who is still training hard is practically invisible in the sports injury literature. But if estrogen protects your ligaments, tendons, and cartilage — what happens when it starts swinging wildly in perimenopause and then disappears?

We do not have a perfect answer. And that is the problem.

The 45 year old training for her first marathon. The 52 year old still on the slopes. She is not in the protocol. She is in my clinic.

Women deserve sports medicine that covers the full arc of their hormonal lives.

Start with my free guide, “10 Steps to Lifelong Vitality,” at f2ortho.com.

04/05/2026

Yesterday I raced the at . I want to start by saying thank you to Meadows for putting on an event that is genuinely inclusive in format. Casual riders and pros, men and women, all at the same starting gate. Some of us old enough to be parents to the youngest adult riders out there. That is rare and it is worth acknowledging.

This year the 50-plus women’s category was removed from the event. I hope they bring it back. The women who showed up deserve it.

Someone on the hill asked me if there were studies on perimenopausal women in competitive snowboarding. There aren’t. The pool is too small. We are unicorns.

And here is why that is not surprising. Women have been chronically understudied in sports medicine research across the board. For decades, women were largely excluded from clinical trials, often because researchers wanted to avoid the “complexity” of hormonal variation. The irony, right?

Women in snowboarding have grown significantly as a demographic, but the women who came into the sport in its infancy were a tiny, scrappy group. We were outliers then. The ones of us still out here in our 50s are a subset of a subset of a subset. So of course the research does not exist.

But here is what we DO know: women tear their ACLs 2-10x more than men, and hormones are a documented part of that risk. The ovulatory phase, when estrogen peaks, is associated with increased ligament laxity and higher injury rates. There is even a ski-specific study showing ACL tears were 2.4x more common in the pre-ovulatory phase in female recreational skiers.

Layer on what perimenopause does starting in your mid-to-late 40s: joint inflammation, ligament loosening, 10% average bone density loss, accelerating muscle loss. Nobody is researching what that means for women who are still out there ripping it up.

We exist. We deserve better data. And we deserve our category back.

Start with my free guide, “10 Steps to Lifelong Vitality,” at f2ortho.com. Sign up for expert guidance on ageless mobility and peak performance.

04/01/2026

Darathorn walked into a beauty pageant and did her thing while everyone else did the same polished strut. She didn’t win the crown. She won something better.

This is the energy I try to bring to everything: my practice, my life, this platform.

Medicine has its own version of the pageant strut. Follow the algorithm. Rush to the OR. Move to the next patient. I built Form and Function Orthopaedics because I refused to do that dance. Joint preservation, regenerative medicine, and real time with real patients.

Different on purpose.

You don’t need to win the crown. You just need to be brave enough to show up as yourself.

Follow along for more, or learn about a different kind of orthopaedic care at f2ortho.com.

04/01/2026

You ever watch kids in PE class dribbling two balls while doing something else entirely and think – wait, that’s me. Every single day.

Midlife women are managing more than anyone talks about. The body changes, the brain fog, the bone loss, the bladder, the burnout – all while still showing up fully for everyone else.
This is not weakness. This is the most undertreated, underresearched, underestimated season of a woman’s life.

I see you. And I built my entire practice around you.

Follow for more real talk on women’s health, joints, hormones, and everything in between.

04/01/2026

The team that dances together, stays together. 🩺✨

After a full day of clinic, these humans still had this in them. I am so lucky.

This is what it looks like when you build a team that actually loves what they do.

Come see us at Form & Function Orthopaedics – link in bio. And if you want more of this, follow along .

03/26/2026

Caption
Cherry blossoms only bloom for two weeks. But the tree that holds them has been building toward that moment all year.
That is exactly how I think about joint and bone health in midlife. The work you do now, the habits you build, the inflammation you address, the strength you protect, that is the investment that keeps you moving, thriving, and fully alive for the next 20, 30, 40 years.
You are not losing your peak. You are building toward it.
Something is coming to help you figure out exactly where you stand and what to do next. Follow along so you do not miss it.

03/24/2026

I’ve been building something.

After thousands of surgeries, patterns emerge that no textbook prepares you for.

The ones who age well, who stay strong, capable, and vital, they have something in common. And it has everything to do with what most people completely overlook.

I’ve spent years turning that pattern into a framework.

JointSpan™

Something is coming. Stay close.

03/23/2026

Lab-grown cartilage is real. And I just used it on this knee.
This is MACI. We harvested cartilage cells from this patient, sent them to a lab where they were multiplied into a living membrane, then I trimmed that membrane to the exact shape of the defect and sealed it in place with a biological adhesive called Tisseel.
Right now it still looks like a pothole. But these are living cells from the patient’s own body. They multiply. They fill in. Over time, that defect becomes new cartilage.
No donor tissue. No synthetic implant. Just your own biology, amplified.
This is joint preservation. And it changes everything for patients who have been told replacement is their only option.
Learn more about what’s possible at f2ortho.com and follow along at for more.

Address

9555 SW Barnes Road, Suite 275
Portland, OR
97225

Opening Hours

Monday 8am - 5pm
Tuesday 8am - 5pm
Wednesday 8am - 5pm
Thursday 8am - 5pm
Friday 8am - 3pm

Telephone

+19719714325

Website

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