Who is the best physio in London?

At the end of a teaching session when the room has thinned out. Over coffee with a surgical pal who has back pain. Who should he see?

I have a few more grey hairs now and a few stories that have grown in the telling. I have heard the question for years.

“Just who is the best physio in London?”

Someone always says the same thing. “Well, there are plenty.” Then a few choice clinics get named. A building. A brand. A postcode.

Never a person.

Nobody was ever treated by a clinic. You are treated by whoever is in the room.

So let me put my hat in the ring.

I have been a physiotherapist since 1992. I opened one clinic in 1996, built it into a group of 14 London-based clinics and sold it nearly thirty years later. Along the way I taught, coached or mentored more than 2,000 clinicians.

I still teach about the spine at Queen Mary University of London to M-level postgraduates. I still treat every week.

Experience is having seen this before. The back that isn’t a back. The runner’s knee that is really a hip. The patient who has done everything asked of them and still needs someone to say what is going on.

That is the job. Find the cause. Say what happens next. Say when it isn’t physio at all and send you to the person it is. I keep a black book for that.

Years ago, a woman came to me with an acutely torn, locked meniscus. She needed a surgeon. Twenty minutes with me, the right introduction, and she was in front of one the next day.

I never saw her again. But five or six people came afterwards saying she had sent them because I had “fixed her knee”.

Judgement. Knowing what to do, including when someone else should do it. I wrote about her in The Turbo Patient.