Teresa Allcock had suffered with back pain on-and-off for much of her life, but nothing could have prepared her for the agonising spasms that arrived in late 2023.
Teresa, 63, a former bank teller from Northamptonshire, began to experience sharp burning pains in her lower back and left side.
At first, she wondered if it could be connected with the aches she had picked up earlier in life from lifting heavy bags of coins in her job. For years, she had been able to manage any pain through regular yoga and pilates classes that kept her active.
However, as the pain mounted, she realised this was something else.
‘I was in agony,’ says Teresa. ‘Even sitting on a soft chair was a no-go. It was excruciating.’
A trip to her GP delivered a diagnosis: sciatica – a condition triggered when the nerve running from the lower back to the feet becomes trapped or irritated.
Studies suggest around 40 per cent of Britons will suffer sciatica at some point in their lives and the risk grows with age.
For many patients, sciatica pain eases within weeks, but Teresa’s plagued her for almost a year. And when the pain on her left side went away, a similar sensation arrived on her right side.
And she would have to wait another year before she was finally given access to a pioneering artificial intelligence-powered physiotherapy programme that cured her sciatica pain in a matter of weeks.
Teresa Allcock had suffered with back pain in her youth, but nothing could have prepared her for the agonising spasms that arrived in late 2023
Before that though, Teresa was forced to suffer through months of debilitating agony.
At first, her GP prescribed her a strong dose of opioids – potent and addictive painkillers.
But, worried that the tablets would impair her ability to look after her 97-year-old father or that she might become hooked on them, Teresa avoided taking them.
However, this left her reliant on over-the-counter painkillers, which were not strong enough to ease the intense shooting pains.
‘I’d stopped going to the gym and exercising because the pain was so bad,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sleeping. I was taking pain relief to sit on a train because I was sitting down.’
When Teresa returned to her GP several months later he then recommended she pay for private physiotherapy sessions, warning that the NHS waiting list for the pain-easing service was around 18 months.
And so she did – spending £60 a session for four appointments.
But many of the exercises prescribed – cat-cow stretches, resistance-band work, child’s pose, thread-the-needle, bridges – were little different from the yoga and Pilates she’d been doing for years.
‘I did them religiously,’ says Teresa. ‘The pain would go, but it’d come back with a vengeance.’
With nothing more than temporary relief four months on, she was back at the GP.
This time, however, he raised a new proposition: Flok Health – an AI physiotherapy service that was being rolled out across NHS Trusts in select parts of the country.
The software, which works in a similar way to popular AI programmes ChatGPT and Claude, allows patients to talk with a virtual physiotherapist via a mobile phone app, who provides tailored exercises and stretches, depending on the patient’s own particular symptoms and pain levels.
It’s available at 14 NHS Trusts today. And Teresa’s GP told her she was eligible.
While some patients might have been sceptical relying on the medical advice of AI, Teresa says she threw herself head-first into the programme.
‘If somebody said jump off a roof I would have done it,’ she says. ‘I just wanted to be pain-free.’
Teresa says the app asked her questions about her pain and asked her to perform movements like bending forwards, backwards and sideways. She then reported how each felt, answering questions like whether one way was easier than others.
Teresa says she was willing to try anything to ease her pain. So she jumped at the chance to try the AI physiotherapy service
After gathering the responses, Flok built a personalised four-week exercise programme – including daily exercises like seated spinal twists, leg-straightening movements and nerve sliders.
And remarkably, after completing it, Mrs Allcock says she is pain free.
‘When I finished I thought, “I’ve got no pain. What’s happened? Where’s it gone?”.’
She says it has taken a huge strain off her mental health.
‘It’s made a huge difference,’ she says. ‘I had the pain for so long, and when you get to my age, life has its ups and downs.
‘I’ve got an elderly dad who I’m supporting. My children are now young adults, and they need help more than ever with trying to get jobs and finishing university – all of that.
‘So, you need to be well.’
Crucially, Teresa says she still has access to the Flok app, which she is able to use free-of-charge.
This means the app can offer her short physio routines if her sciatica flares up – as it has several times, including on a recent holiday.
‘Usually I would need to see a clinician or find a chemist to get painkillers,’ she says.
‘That spoils everybody’s holiday because everyone is worried about you. Your back has gone and you’re wondering whether you need to go to hospital.
‘This time, I just followed the app’s instructions and within days of starting these exercises, the pain was gone again.’
It might sound like a near-miraculous turnaround, but experts say that growing evidence shows that AI services like Flok could be the future of physiotherapy.
Almost a third of the UK population suffers some kind of pain problem, such as arthritis. Appointments for these conditions make up 30 per cent of GP consultations in England.
And NHS England shows that more than 372,000 people are waiting for pain treatment, a large proportion of whom, like Teresa, have back pain.
‘People are waiting longer and longer for physio and are often disappointed,’ says Dr Lianne Wood, a pain expert at the University of Exeter.
‘And even when you get to see someone, the service can be dire. You can get outstanding NHS physio and sometimes it’s a sheet of paper with some exercises on it. We have this variation in services at the moment and it’s not ideal.’
Dr Wood said digital services such as Flok may appeal to patients because they offer a more ‘personalised’ approach to managing pain.
‘We know that AI tools can be more empathetic than people,’ she says.
‘They certainly can respond to us in a way that feels human, and perhaps they are the thing that will meet that need.’
For Teresa, being pain free has given her ‘control’ of her life again.
‘The programme might not be for everybody,’ she says. ‘But it’s helped me so much.’
