Practice Stories
Respiratory physiotherapist · founder, Body Mind IQ
A respiratory physiotherapist who spent the pandemic keeping strangers alive on ventilators explains why the disease she's now fighting starts long before anyone gets sick.
Bal Matharu was supposed to study computer science. She enrolled, gave it a year, and left. "It wasn't me because there wasn't people in front of me," she says. "I've always been a little bit more of a carer." A visit to her cousin, a physiotherapist in Canada, settled it. She came home, applied to physiotherapy straight away, and, in her words, "never looked back." Almost three decades later she would specialize in one of the profession's least-known corners — respiratory physiotherapy, the discipline built around the one function everybody performs without thinking about it until they can't. "When our breath goes, we go," she says. It became her career's organizing idea before it became her company's name.
Bal spent the pandemic spread across four fronts at once — community care, intensive care, elective surgery, hospital wards — working what she calls "all sorts of hours." Community care was the hardest, she says, because "sometimes we'd leave patients not knowing whether they'd be still there when we went back." Intensive care was close behind. One case has stayed with her since. A woman had just given birth when she contracted COVID during delivery. "The baby was fine. The baby was taken by her husband, but then the mother was on double ventilator support with 90% oxygen flowing through her lungs." For thirty days, the team believed she was turning a corner. She hadn't yet seen her baby. "We got to day 30 and we thought things were going to start turning around... but unfortunately she went downhill and we lost her." A mother who gave birth and never saw her child.
Stories like that didn't disappear when the wards quieted down. "They just zapped it out of us," Bal says of the toll the acute years took on her and her colleagues — clinicians who, she notes, go into caring professions precisely because they're the kind of people who give everything when a crisis demands it. Two years later, in 2022, the bill came due. "I did literally have a burnout at that point and that's when I did leave the NHS."
What pulled Bal out of the acute system and into something of her own wasn't just exhaustion — it was a question the pandemic kept raising and never answered for her. She noticed something that didn't add up: some of the sickest COVID patients in intensive care had no significant medical history at all, healthy people in their thirties and forties fighting for their lives on double ventilator support, while others with real comorbidities barely needed hospital care. "It made me question that what's going on here?" That question sent her toward Dr. Robert Naviaux's cell danger theory and, from there, toward lifestyle medicine — the idea that chronic stress can leave cells too depleted, on a cellular level, to mount a real defense when illness arrives. "That was a real light bulb moment for me," she says.
That light bulb became Body Mind IQ, the company she founded to help people reverse chronic, non-communicable disease — not by treating the disease in isolation, but by rebuilding the six pillars the world's longest-lived populations share: nutrition, movement, sleep, stress management, relationships, and reducing substance abuse. Underneath all six pillars, Bal keeps coming back to breath — the tool the body has always had to help stored stress "alchemize" and move on, rather than accumulate for decades until the body can't cope. She's now working toward a doctorate in lifestyle medicine to formalize what her clinical years taught her the hard way.
Ask Bal about AI and she doesn't hesitate: "There's a place for AI definitely." She sees real value in letting it absorb the "mundane jobs" — note-taking, meeting summaries, the administrative weight that used to eat clinical time — so that clinicians have room left over to be, in her words, "more creative with ourselves." But she draws her line at the exam room door, and she draws it from the same place her whole career comes from: the body. "We're regulatory beings, so we've got nervous systems, and those nervous systems will co-regulate with another person to help them feel better, and AI can't do that because it doesn't have a nervous system." Long before there was language, she says, there was the language of the body — the way one nervous system tells another it's safe. That, to her, isn't a preference. It's biology.
Her instruction to other clinicians nervous about the shift isn't caution, though. It's the opposite: "Not to be afraid of it." Let the tool take the tasks that drain you, she says, so you can spend the time you get back on the part of care no machine can do — sitting across from someone and letting them feel safe enough to open up.
What Bal hasn't fully settled — and doesn't pretend to — is where the boundary actually sits as the tools get better. She's watched a global health system nearly break under the weight of exactly the kind of stress her whole practice now exists to treat, and she's rebuilding her corner of care one nervous system at a time, one pillar at a time, still deciding in real time how much of the load technology is allowed to carry before something human gets lost in the handoff.
Watch the conversation to hear her walk through the cell danger theory, the six pillars, and what it actually took to leave the NHS behind.