Nick Potter

Bio

Nick Potter is Consultant Osteopath at King Edward VII hospital, London and has consulted to Brevan Howard Asset Management for 11 years, as Head of Health and Well-being, where, apart from managing the employees musculoskeletal problems, he curates personalised health and performance programmes for the traders. He has pioneered the use of interoception to manage their traders’ stress levels. 

He runs busy clinics at the King Edward VII hospital in London, specialising in chronic spinal and pain syndromes, chronic fatigue and ‘brain fog’. Nick is also a published author in 6 languages and has been in practice for 28 years. 

Nick knows, through personal experience of a spinal injury, what pain is all about. Through applying his principles he is pain-free.

He is currently doing research on Hypermobility (under the heading of ‘Bendy bodies Bendy brains’) and its links to ADHD and anxiety disorders, and recently convened a working group to link the related specialities and neuroscience. Nick is the on-call osteopath to several theatre and film production companies. 

Nick qualified in 1993 from the British School of Osteopathy. He wrote his thesis on innate elements of athleticism in black athletes, in conjunction with the Chicago College of Osteopathic medicine, Midwestern University.

He has a diploma in medical acupuncture.

Nick splits his clinical time with consulting in his health, well-being, and performance role at Brevan Howard, utilising his background in sports performance – Formula 1, Elite rugby, Golf (Seve Ballesteros), Tennis and UK athletics 400m. He has spent 15 years studying the nature and effects of stress on decision-making and risk aversion, and their relevance in financial markets and trading, as well as formulating strategies to combat those effects. Through his links with Brevan Howard he has worked with John Coats (‘The Hour between Dog and Wolf’) and Dr. Danny Kahneman (‘Thinking Fast and Slow’) to study stress responses universal to us all and which are independent of personality type.

In the late 90s, Nick trained with Dr John Sarno in New York in ‘Tension Myositis syndrome’ and was lucky enough to study with Dr Konstantin Buteyko in 1997 at The Hale Clinic in London. Dr Buteyko’s breathing science techniques are now hailed all over the world for their transformative effects. 

From his experiences, Nick developed his passion for the understanding of breathing pattern disorders, as well as their effects on internal brain and body states and their manifestation in the musculo-skeletal system.

In the early 2000’s, Nick worked in Paris with Alain Prost’s team doctor for The Institut Biomedical Sports et Vie, conducting intensive assessments of F1 drivers and their environments, going on to be a Human Performance Advisor to Jaguar F1 (Eddie Irvine and Mark Webber). From the findings they made, particularly in sleep and stress medicine, the concept of the ‘Corporate Athlete’ was formulated, which Nick presented at Insead Business School. After raising £10m of investment, this went onto to become a human performance centre, ‘VieLife’, in the city in London.

He also worked with the Western Australian Institute of Sport to build a digitally based multiple parameter tracking system for athletes, taking particular interest in Heart Rate Variability and the Autonomic Nervous System (‘dysautonomia’) as early as 2004. This led him into developing his research and knowledge into the science of stress as an adaptive mechanism and its relationship to cancer, auto-immunity, and psycho-somatic illness.

In 2004, he co-founded the London Spine Clinic, a private neurosurgical unit in Harley Street, where he worked with a multidisciplinary team, treating complex spinal and musculoskeletal problems. After 15 years, he moved to the Princess Grace Hospital Orthopaedic Centre and set up the Centre for Physical Medicine to develop further his other orthopaedic interests. This included researching the relationship between hip biomechanics and back pain (spino-pelvic relationship to hip dysplasia) and a new clinical test to evaluate it. (Potter Hip Impingement Test). He also co-convened the weekly, spinal multidisciplinary team meeting regularly attended by 20 specialists. He is still a member of four other weekly orthopaedic multi-disciplinary team meetings (spine, hip, knee, and foot).

In 2006, he spent time at the St. Hubertus Medical Park Rehabilitation Hospital in Germany, training in intensive residential rehab and recovery medicine. He also worked in Sydney during his training in Gerontology and is passionate about helping the elderly to remain well in all elements of their health, to enjoy later life (‘adding life to years, not years to life’).

Nick believes strongly that you cannot separate human body-physiology from the brain and nervous system and that they are one and the same – indeed, tracking what goes on in the body can give us strong insight into what the subconscious brain is doing and thinking.

In 2013, Nick founded Bakpro, an affordable spinal self-treatment programme with online spinal health content. Then in 2020, he went on to launch a unique med-tech wearable, ‘Exhalo’, which monitors and coaches real-time breathing patterns and breath-holding in response to stress.

Nick runs a regular BBC radio health ‘surgery’ on chronic pain and his book, ‘The Meaning of Pain’, published in 2018 is now available in six languages. He is dedicated to creating changes in global and public health. He runs a special programme for chronic pain and pioneers the treatment of the elderly with multiple pain sites, as well as the effects of menopause.

Throughout his career Nick split his time, working for 22 years in primary care with a team of GPs. He is fondly known as ‘Nick-the-neck’ by his colleagues, due to his specialisation in cervical spine injuries ( the upper cervical syndrome) as well as head, neck, and facial pain syndromes.

Nick is a keen and active lecturer and has travelled all over the world to teach, as well as treat patients, and was consultant osteopath to the Kingdom of Bahrain and the Sultan Qaboos University Hospital in Oman. He has worked in the US, Australia, Germany, France and the Middle East.

A keen sportsman (marathons, triathlons and playing rugby in the UK and New Zealand), Nick still enjoys running and tennis. He played rugby himself to a high level and coached with the Junior Rugby Academy at Henley Rugby Club for seven years. Currently, he is a governor of Rupert House School, UK. Nick is married with two children.