Anisha Joshi
Hybrid work has shifted the cost of bad workplace design onto employees, and onto the absence and presenteeism numbers that follow. Back pain is now the leading cause of disability among UK adults under 45, and the kitchen-table desk is quietly making it worse. Organisations promoting wellbeing as policy still rarely address the physical conditions in which their people actually work.
Anisha Joshi is an award-winning osteopath and author of Heal Your Back (Penguin, 2024) who helps organisations cut the physical cost of how their people now work.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Anisha Joshi
- A clinician, not a wellness commentator. Osteopathic practice spanning over a decade, a multi-site clinic group, and a Penguin-published book on back pain give the room a credibility most workplace-wellbeing speakers lack.
- A clinical reading of burnout. She treats burnout as a physical process that accumulates in the body before it shows up in performance or absence data, which puts it on the risk register for HR and leadership.
- Named recognition: Principal of the Year from the Institute of Osteopathy (2019), and resident on-screen osteopath for ITV’s This Morning.
- The musculoskeletal cost of hybrid work, addressed specifically. Ergonomic assessment, posture, movement, and pain prevention applied to real desk and home-working setups.
- Changes employees can apply the same week, which is what HR and benefits teams need to see returned in engagement and absence data.
Biography highlights
- Author of Heal Your Back: 4 Steps to a Pain-Free Life, Penguin (Vermilion), 2024.
- Principal of the Year, Institute of Osteopathy, 2019.
- Resident on-screen osteopath for ITV’s This Morning.
- Principal Osteopath and Clinic Director at Woodside Osteopathic Clinic, and co-founder of the Osteo Allies clinic group across London, Surrey, and Hertfordshire.
- Graduate of the British College of Osteopathic Medicine (BCOM), London.
- Clinical caseload spanning elite athletes, broadcasters, and senior executives alongside desk-based teams, with media commentary across The Telegraph, Vanity Fair, Women’s Health, and Hello!.
Biography
Back pain is the leading cause of disability among UK adults under 45, and hybrid work has turned desk-based musculoskeletal injury into an organisational problem rather than a personal one. The HSE counted 511,000 UK workers with a work-related musculoskeletal disorder in 2024/25, and 7.1 million working days lost to them. Most corporate wellbeing programmes still answer that with a gym subsidy and a leaflet.
A graduate of the British College of Osteopathic Medicine, Anisha Joshi has practised osteopathy for over a decade and now directs the Osteo Allies clinic group across London, Surrey, and Hertfordshire. Her caseload runs from broadcasters and elite athletes to desk-based teams, which gives her a precise view of what separates the people who sustain high performance from those who break under it.
Her book brings that clinical view into usable form. Heal Your Back: 4 Steps to a Pain-Free Life (Penguin, 2024) sets out a structured approach to managing back pain through movement, mindset, nutrition, and sleep, drawn from her own case files. The Institute of Osteopathy named her Principal of the Year in 2019, and she has been the resident on-screen osteopath for ITV’s This Morning.
For corporate audiences she does something most wellbeing speakers cannot. She names what is physically wrong with the average hybrid workstation, and she treats burnout as a physical process that accumulates long before it surfaces in absence data. The practical question she leaves a room with is what to change before those numbers move.
Key speaking topics
- Workplace ergonomics and musculoskeletal health
- Back pain prevention and management
- The physical accumulation of burnout
- Hybrid and remote-work wellbeing
- Physical sustainability in high performance
- The mind-body connection in pain and stress
- Posture, movement, and desk-based work
Ideal for
- HR, people, and benefits leaders responsible for hybrid-work wellbeing and absence outcomes
- Health and safety, facilities, and workplace-design teams reviewing ergonomic standards
- Professional-services and finance firms with desk-bound, high-pressure workforces
- Women’s leadership programmes addressing the physical cost of sustained senior performance
Audience outcomes
- A clinical, not anecdotal, picture of how hybrid working drives musculoskeletal injury
- Specific changes to workstation setup, posture, and movement that an employee can apply the same day
- The four-step approach to managing and preventing back pain from the Heal Your Back model
- How burnout builds physically before it shows in behaviour, and where to interrupt it
- A clearer line between psychological stress and physical symptoms, and what to do about both
Talks
A clinical account of what hybrid and desk-based work does to the body, why standard ergonomic guidance falls short, and what organisations can change at both a structural and an individual level.
Key takeaways:
- The musculoskeletal pattern emerging across hybrid and desk-based workforces, set against the latest HSE data
- Why standard ergonomic guidance is not sufficient on its own
- Specific changes to workstation, posture, and movement that employees can apply the same day
How burnout accumulates physically long before it registers in performance or attendance data, and where organisations can intervene during the build-up rather than at the point of crisis.
Key takeaways:
- What burnout looks like clinically, before it surfaces in behaviour or absence
- Why most interventions arrive at crisis point rather than during accumulation
- Where managers and organisations can interrupt the pattern earlier
Anisha’s concept of the Body Debt describes the accumulated physical cost of sustained high performance without adequate recovery. It stays invisible in performance data and is expensive to reverse once it surfaces. The talk treats burnout as a performance and organisational-risk issue grounded in clinical evidence.
Key takeaways:
- What the Body Debt is and how it builds in high performers
- Why the cost stays hidden in performance metrics until late
- What recovery looks like when burnout is understood as physical
Years of treating elite athletes, broadcasters, and senior executives have shown a consistent pattern in how the people who sustain performance relate to their bodies. This talk turns that clinical observation into a leadership framework, drawn from anonymised real cases rather than theory.
Key takeaways:
- The physical disciplines that separate sustainable performers from those who break down
- How high performers read and manage physical signals instead of overriding them
- What leaders can carry from clinical practice into their own working patterns
Ambitious women learn to override the body’s signals, treating physical capacity as something to push through. The medical consequences are well documented, and the organisational ones are now showing in the data. This talk sets out the physical foundation that sustainable senior leadership depends on.
Key takeaways:
- Why senior women report higher rates of frequent burnout than men at the same level
- The physical cost of consistently overriding stress and fatigue signals
- A framework for protecting the physical basis of long-term leadership
How AI-powered health tools and the body’s own signals can be used together, including a live on-stage demonstration. Anisha’s argument is that the missing piece is not more data but the biological awareness to interpret it: AI reads the data; she reads the person.
Key takeaways:
- Where wearable and AI health data is strong, and where it misreads the individual
- How to combine self-tracking tools with physical self-awareness
- The practical limits of data-led self-care for high-pressure roles