Our £1 billion back problem and the man who says he has a cure

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In the south wing of a pristine new building in central London, the masters of the universe are at work. Peering at graphs on screens, poised over keyboards, dressed mainly in jeans and T-shirts, not uttering a word, these youngish men work for one of the world’s leading hedge funds, betting around £120 million a throw on anything from interest rates to inflation, reaping whacking profits for their clients. I have a horrible feeling most of them will earn more this year than I will in my lifetime.

“They’re geeks, a lot of them,” says Nick Potter, the man who makes sure the men (only two out of forty are women) are on peak form, regarding them fondly from the far side of a glasspanel, like animals in the zoo. “They’re very high-performing people, poached from places such as Goldman Sachs, dealing with big bucks, who just want to sit there and do very little except think intensely for hours at a time. Even after all the lights have gone out, I see them still sitting there.”

On cue, one worker bee spots Potter and hastily presses a button so his desk rises to chest height. Then he grabs a weird-looking S-shaped stick devised by Potter (more of which later) and starts jabbing one end into his upper back, all the time analysing data. “Good man,” Potter notes in his pukka tones. “They’ve all got these standing desks, which they need to use for at least one third of the day or they get a kicking.”

Garrulous and fizzier than Perrier, Potter is 48, tall, well built (he’s a former rugby player) and very blond, to the point where a policeman once apprehended him, accusing him of being Julian Assange and having escaped from the Ecuadorean embassy.

His official job description at this hedge fund, which insists on remaining anonymous and where he works two days a week, is that of “wellbeing consultant”, a slightly airy-fairy title for someone who, in fact, has been an osteopath for 24 years and the go-to “back man” for numerous celebrities and sports people, including – among others – Diana, Princess of Wales, Sir Elton John (who calls him “the man who allowed me to breathe”), Bruce Willis and Miranda Hart, not to mention various other royals, both here and abroad.

Potter’s smart hedge-fund office (he also has a Harley Street practice) contains a couch for pummelling knotted spines and a large comfy sofa where employees can pour their hearts out, but there’s also – somewhat disconcertingly – a sign on the door that reads “Daddy”.

“I know it sounds weird, but that’s what lots of them call me,” he says. “They’re looked after like an elite team and I’m like their manager. They love it,” he says. “I get involved in everything, I’m not a counsellor but I do a lot of shrinkery. They need to be on it, so if they go into the doldrums, I have to keep them on their game. One may have a wife who’s a bit feisty who is putting him off – I’ve had a few of those – and sometimes I’ve had to go into schools to sort out issues with the kids.”

Most of them, however, will have originally entered the room complaining of backache, which statistics show will affect virtually every Briton – rich or poor, famous or “civilian” – at some point in their lives. Nearly half of us are suffering chronic pain, costing the National Health Service £1 billion a year, most of which – Potter says – is money down the drain.

“In the NHS, back pain is really badly treated. Most people who go to the doctor will be prescribed medication or offered surgery, which they don’t need and doesn’t work,” he says. “Of all the spinal operations, probably only two are necessary. The rest will just defer the problem and often make it worse.”

The reason why traditional medicine doesn’t work – “I realised very early even osteopaths can only help to a point” – is that most of our pain has less to do with twisted muscles and more to do with far deeper-rooted anxieties.

“A shoulder doesn’t come through my door, a patient does, and the shoulder’s attached to that patient,” Potter says. “Most illnesses are musculoskeletal in origin and around 30 to 50 per cent of them are to do with a stress-related disorder, so you have to find out what that stress is, because their pain is usually a somatisation of that. People put their problems into their tissues, because it’s easier to deal with a physical pain that you can put ice on or apply heat to, than deal with an emotional pain. It could be having a boss who shouts at you; it could be living with a shit of a husband. I tell patients, ‘Look, you have to leave him. He’s a prick. Otherwise, you’re never going to get better.’ It sounds a bit weird and wacky, but it’s not.”

Such a holistic approach means many clients come to regard Potter as an all-round guru, who, even if their problems are beyond his remit, can point them in the direction of someone who can solve them. When Tom Cruise fractured his ankle filmingM:I 6 – Mission Impossiblein London earlier this year, Potter was called in (he’s on all the film studios’ speed dial) to treat him, but ended up referring him to someone else.

Another former client was Samantha Cameron, whom he visited regularly for 6 months when she was living in Downing Street, using his “secret weapon” – a little black book packed with the names of London’s best, most discreet specialists – while making sure never to attract adverse attention in the manner of Cherie Blair’s “lifestyle coach”, Carole Caplin. “Samantha Cameron was a good example of someone operating under enormous pressure and balancing the challenges of being a dedicated mother, holding down a job and being the wife of the prime minister, but reluctant to be in the limelight. She needed quick access to definitive care,” Potter says.

Potter also discreetly saw Diana, Princess of Wales, at the Harbour Club on and off for two years. “In the same way, her life was not her own and the stress of that life was enormous and had to always be faced with a smiling face,” he says.

Apart from resolving our personal problems, what else should we do to protect our spines? I’m expecting Potter to wheel out the usual homilies, such as do Pilates or yoga (“Pilates will help some people and hurt others; same with yoga. It’s what’s right for you,” he shrugs); don’t wear heels (“I’m not anti-heels. A little one is fine. Just only wear the high ones when you need to be glam in the evening”).

But it turns out the key to a pain-free back lies – quite simply – in the way we breathe, something, Potter says, that most of us do all wrong, meaning our muscles are in a perpetual state of tension.

“Nature created us to breathe with our diaphragm; if we don’t, no energy rushes in,” he explains. He points an accusing finger at me. “You’re doing it! You were so intent on what I was saying you stopped breathing.”

I have a cold, I protest. “That’s irrelevant! Everyone says it’s about this, or about that … You can still breathe through your mouth. If you don’t breathe right, you’re not getting the gaseous exchanges you need, you’re taking in too much oxygen and giving out too much carbon dioxide.” This, it transpires, leads to endless nasties, from heightened allergies, gut dysfunction, anxiety and foggy thinking to my constantly aching right shoulder.

Still, at least I’m not alone in this failure to perform the most basic of functions. “Anyone with pressure on themselves, which is basically everybody, is going to respond by not breathing properly. It’s the body going into flight mode,” Potter says. “Creative people are especially bad at breathing. They’re worriers who take little short breaths through the chest rather than deep breaths through the diaphragm, and that makes them 30 per cent less creative, because they’re wasting 30 per cent more energy as their muscles can’t relax.

“People think that backache is about your muscles, but it really isn’t,” he continues. “Your muscles get tight, but only because of your response to your environment. It’s very prehistoric. If on the plains you met a sabre-toothed tiger, you didn’t have time to think about it or you’d be dead. So your hindbrain would switch on and say, ‘Just f***ing run,’ and you start to hyperventilate and your forebrain, which makes decisions, shuts down. And that’s what still happens to us, even though we’ve nothing really to be frightened of any more. All this stuff now about mindfulness is great, but what it’s really about is breathing, putting your limbic centre into de-stress and calming down.”

Things are made worse by the fact that, unlike our tiger-fleeing ancestors, more than 80 per cent of us now spend 7-plus hours a day at a desk, allowing our spines to atrophy. “Sitting is our enemy: it’s the new smoking. It’s giving us cancer and all sorts of things,” Potter cries. “A lot of the guys I deal with here – as well as creatives, intellectuals and academics – see their bodies just as something to carry their brains to meetings.”

Any kind of exercise can help. “But the most important thing is to get up and move every hour for five minutes – that’s far more beneficial than an hour’s exercise once a day. The reason our joints hurt is simply because we don’t use them enough.”

Equally crippling is our passion for laptops, over which we hunch, Quasimodo-like, for hours. “Laptops are absolute killers. We see more disc injuries from them than from anything else,” Potter fulminates. “I’ve just seen an 18-year-old at my clinic with a disc bulging in her neck from so much time spent on hers. It’s gobsmacking, and it’s made worse by these collaborative workspaces where they’ve put in school tables because they think it looks cool. I just won’t use one.”

His advice is whenever possible to use a desktop computer and – much harder – to minimise time hunched over phone screens, a big issue for adolescents. “A lot of teenagers we’re seeing now are going to live to be older than 100, but they already have degenerative necks that they’re stuck with for another 90 years,” says Potter, who has a 17-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son, and moved from London to Berkshire deliberately “to push them into the garden and away from devices”.

Just as alarming are the growing numbers of children and teenagers Potter treats who suffer from stress-related pain. “I see them all the time – they have face, neck and jaw pains and they’re clenching their teeth. They’re under so much pressure to get into the next school, to get one up on the next child – it’s tragic. And all that tension in their bodies is destroying their creativity.”

They’re also, he says, under huge pressure from social media. “One in four teenage girls is now suffering from depression and so much of it is they’re competing on Instagram, being made to feel inadequate by the lies other people are putting out about their perfect lives. Having to deal with all that is exhausting and it presents in my clinic as physical pain.”

Actors, comics and the like “are performance people. They’re under pressure all the time. Comedians especially have brutal lives that are constantly stressful; they practise for months and then get up on stage with the potential to die – in the sense of not getting laughs – every night. Then the higher you go, the thinner the air becomes. People want to see you fall. It’s hardly surprising most of them are racked by personal issues. It’s almost as if the pay-off for creativity is unhappiness.”

Former public schoolboys, who still make up so many of our leaders, are another large chunk of Potter’s clientele. “We don’t have any public schoolboys [at the hedge fund], because they won’t take risks – at those schools, you basically get punished for failing, so nobody does it,” he says.

“All the men I see who were sent away to prep school, oh my God! Their bodies are like concrete. I saw one man about his bulging discs and when I asked about his school, he suddenly welled up: ‘I always wondered why my mother sent me away.’ He’s f***ing 52. They’re very punchy people, great survivors, but from an early age they had no privacy and could never relax. They couldn’t scratch their nuts without everybody watching, they had people nicking their bacon every morning, also there were elements of bullying and so on, and that means they’re constantly on edge. That tension manifests itself through pain.”

The son of a high-court judge, Potter himself attended the public school St Paul’s in London (though not as a boarder) – George Osborne was a contemporary. He planned to be a doctor, but during his gap year, he fractured his spine and broke several ribs in a rugby scrum (he still suffers from backache today). Inspired by the various osteopaths who treated him, he dropped out of medical school to train at the British School of Osteopathy.

For years, he worked with various sports people, including Seve Ballesteros. The main reason he moved on (though he still has the occasional client from that world) was because he was bored. “Everyone goes on about how amazing Mo Farah is, everyone goes on about, ‘Oh the dedication’ – all that man does all day is train for two hours, sleep and eat. It’s hardly a difficult life. In the old days of the Olympics, your grandfather or mine might have worked for the Foreign Office all day and then trained – that was proper dedication. People market themselves on, ‘Oh, I look after this team,’ but actually it’s really easy. These guys are very fit, so all you are basically doing is treating pulled muscles. It sounds awful but you end up hoping they’ll do something serious so you’ll have something to do.”

The day-to-day niggles may not have challenged him, but he loved the pioneering work he did, analysing every element of these men’s biology and their disciplines’ requirements to produce bespoke training plans. He then realised he could use the same techniques to maximise corporate performances. “These guys have these crazy schedules, travelling constantly round the world, and they realised I could help boost their creativity.

“I’d really like,” he goes on, “to get my hands on Theresa May. Her posture is shocking and it betrays her negotiatory position immediately. If someone comes at you standing up strong it shows you mean business, but instead she does that …” He jumps up and starts slouching Neanderthal-like towards me. “It’s her breathing shutting down. She curls all her chest muscles. What she’s saying is, ‘I’m afraid of you.’ And these guys know it, because they’ve had their own training.

“Look at Obama the day he touched the Queen – he knew exactly how to do it. Same with Clinton: he has that amazing open-posture stuff, which gives the message, ‘I’m very inclusive.’ All the leaders I’ve worked with had a go-to team around them – Tony Blair had a phenomenal one – but Theresa May has no one at all. She’s been abandoned.”

Potter’s an obsessive, talking far more rapidly than any of the athletes he’s fixed could ever run, intent on spreading his gospel. As for dealing with celebrities, “Sorting non-elite patients with more complicated health and spinal problems is much more interesting and challenging,” he exclaims.

Aware, however, that few of us can afford his fees, he’s just launched a kit called Bakpro, a box containing a ball with a knobbly protrusion, three foam cylinders which can be linked together and placed under your spine and the weird S-shaped device I witnessed the hedge-funder prodding into his shoulder. All these – combined with a very informative booklet and DVD, including plenty of information on that all-important breathing – can be used by anyone at home. My husband, who has chronic neck issues, was impressed, taking the ball on a bonkers 48-hour trip to India to ward off inevitable agonies.

But will we keep on using it? “It’s soul-destroying how little people will do to help themselves. We’ve become intrinsically lazy as a race,” says Potter. “People have been disempowered into thinking the doctor can fix anything, that they just need a tablet. That’s why antibiotics are overused because we have no tolerance for being ill. Millennials are the worst; they always want to get away with doing just enough. I say, ‘Why?’ They say, ‘So we can have more time for other things.’ Well, what things? More staring at their phones?”

Millennials are hardly the only ones at fault, I think, as – once out of Potter’s offices – I immediately sling my overloaded bag over one shoulder and bend over my phone to deal with the 20-odd messages that have arrived while we’ve been talking. Judging by the number of hedge-funders who pass me clutching Pret bags, clearly unwilling to risk several million slipping through their fingers, I’m not alone. I just hope they remember to breathe.

Published in The Times November 25 2017