The MSK pain gap in Canada

Musculoskeletal (MSK) pain is one of the most common reasons Canadians miss work, sleep poorly, and stop doing the activities they used to love. It's also one of the most undertreated — not because care doesn't exist, but because the friction to access it is higher than the pain, most weeks.

The "wait list" story isn't the whole story

The commonly cited stat is the six-to-twelve week wait for a first physio appointment. That's real — but it's a small piece of the picture. The bigger pieces:

Cost: the average Ontario first physio visit is around CAD $90 out of pocket, and many private plans only partially reimburse, or cap annual coverage at eight visits.
Follow-through: in a cohort of patients who do get a home exercise program at their first visit, only about 30–40% follow through for the full six-week window. The clinical content was right; the adherence infrastructure wasn't.
Commute + scheduling: for a non-urgent problem, a 90-minute round trip twice a week loses to whatever the rest of the week looks like.

What "doing nothing" actually looks like

People don't just decide to suffer. They pick the lowest-friction thing that might help:

Asking in a family group chat.
Googling exercises, half-committing for three days, stopping.
Buying a foam roller, using it twice.
Waiting to see if it resolves on its own (which, for some MSK conditions, it does).

For 70% of cases, any deliberate, progressive movement program — even a generic one — improves symptoms. The thing that blocks most people isn't the exercises, it's the system around the exercises.

What we think the right answer looks like

An AI coach is not a substitute for a physiotherapist. It's a different category of thing, with different strengths. It's available at 6 a.m. It adapts to your actual pain instead of giving you a static PDF. It remembers what you did yesterday. It knows when to stop coaching and route you to a human.

That's what we're building.

Citations for this post are in draft and will be added before launch.