Inside Healthnix’s Nutrition-Focused Approach to Managing Chronic Pain

Chronic pain affects over 53 million Americans. That is more than one in five adults. Yet treatment for chronic pain is usually reactive and rarely extends beyond prescription drugs. The opioid epidemic has called this approach into question.

With opioids accounting for 76% of all lethal drug overdoses, researchers in non-pharmaceutical treatments have a way to quantify the cost of failing to find new strategies for chronic pain management.

This has also led to a wave of startups focused on managing pain through dietary regimens.

While “food as medicine” has become trendy both in Silicon Valley and in discussions of public health, many products and dietary routines offered in response lack scientific backing. Lacking clinical validation, these approaches often rely on anecdotal stories or the name power of a social media influencer to establish their credibility.

Enter Healthnix, a small company that has partnered with rheumatologists and nutrition scientists, and has undertaken NHS pilots to develop a scientifically attested, anti-inflammatory diet for treating chronic pain, particularly arthritis. Healthnix’s software walks arthritis and other chronic pain patients through personalized dietary protocols that are informed by the latest research in chronic inflammation and integrative medicine. The platform strives to fill today’s gap in chronic pain treatment by offering precision nutrition.

Founder Maja Mazur is no stranger to chronic pain. Born in post-communist Poland just three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Maja rose from childhood in a grey block of flats to graduating top of her class (in the fifth-best high school in Poland).

She then studied a futuristic and now extremely coveted interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences degree (think combining coding courses with philosophy of science and smart city planning), launched by one of the leading figures in British education, Prof. Carl Gombrich, at University College London, and practiced at Norton Rose Fulbright and Goldman Sachs.

In her early 20s, while working at Goldman Sachs, Maja developed debilitating and persistent pain in her hip.

“On the worst days, I could barely walk,” she recalls. “I couldn’t sit in a car for longer than 30 minutes because the seats were inclined. Not knowing why it happened, whether it would keep getting worse until I couldn’t walk at all, and seeing how it ruined my social life, how it meant I couldn’t do any of the sports I loved (Mazur is a keen kitesurfer, skier and has trekked for 21 days in winter in Himalayas before her injury) or couldn’t even drive for longer than 30 minutes, was terrifying. I must have visited at least five different experts in London, heard various diagnoses, a suggestion of surgery, or a classic ‘it’s in your head’/‘it’s not so bad.’”

During COVID-19, access to medical care became more difficult, which made Maja’s symptoms even worse. In 2021, the lack of pain management solutions drove Maja to start working with a functional medicine expert. Developing her own protocol took a long time, but once they determined what was triggering her symptoms, improvement was both staggering and rapid. Once she returned to surfing and hiking, at the time already working as a product lead at an early-stage federated machine learning startup in London, the idea to create Healthnix began to take shape in her mind.

That’s when she started seeking out precision nutrition specialists and rheumatologists, as well as spending her nights poring over scientific journal articles to form the thesis for the company. She also had her childhood memories to draw upon; her mother had battled cancer, supplementing more traditional treatments with nutrition. Both Maja and her mother would have fallen through the cracks in the healthcare industry, due to inadequate clinical pain treatment and limited financial resources, if it had not been for their own determination to find other solutions.

“I am building a solution that I needed and which I know my mum needed. These two stories, of two women across two generations,” Maja remarks, “really inspired me to build a digital solution that helps anyone struggling with chronic pain and chronic disease to identify what nutrition can help them self-manage effectively and in a way that is not overwhelming and can work around their lifestyle.”

Healthnix is more than just the success story of its founder’s perseverance in the face of a challenge that nearly defeated her. It is also a story of effective healthcare innovation in a challenging market. Relocating to the United States to work with a top New York City start-up accelerator (Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator), with directors from the Cleveland Clinic as advisors, this precision nutrition clinic launched in the middle of post-COVID investor fatigue in the healthtech industry.

This is not the easiest sector to get started in, especially now. That makes the traction Healthnix has already gained especially remarkable.

And while the company had its origin in Maja’s own struggle to overcome chronic pain, its strength today lies in its personalized platform that scales and systematizes anti-inflammatory diet research for the needs of diverse patients.

Today, Healthnix is eyeing partnerships in Texas, New York, and California, where demand for integrative pain care is rising. “There has never been a better time to revolutionize chronic pain care, and the way to do this is through food as medicine and whole person care,” Maja advocates.

With the growing “food as medicine” hype, Maja believes it is especially important to help the public differentiate between “hocus pocus solutions” and clinical nutrition. It is the right time to respond to the lack of reliable, non-pharmaceutical chronic pain management with clinically-backed, research-attested precision nutrition—and that is what Healthnix is all about.