How Healthnix Is Tackling Chronic Pain With Smart Nutrition and AI

Countless people worldwide suffer from chronic pain that affects their quality of life and drives up healthcare costs. In America alone, according to the CDC, that number is over 80 million, amounting to over 24% of the population, with healthcare costs estimated at over $635 billion. “Its complexity and training deficits in healthcare providers result in many patients receiving ineffective care,” the National Library of Medicine states.

Traditional treatments often mask pain rather than address its underlying causes, and that’s where Healthnix takes a different approach. Founded by Maja Mazur, Healthnix combines artificial intelligence, personalized nutrition, and behavioral support to help doctors and patients identify and manage the dietary triggers that drive chronic pain.

Managing Pain Through Nutrition 

Healthnix offers over 140 easy-to-understand digital lessons that explain how the brain, gut, pain, emotions, and diet are all connected in the paradigm of whole-person care. The program allows clinicians to refer their patients to a structured framework for whole-person care and empowers patients to make lasting changes by working with a dietitian trained in helping more complex individuals. It solves the current issues around access to care in the US, where there is only one pain expert for over 28 thousand patients, by providing a high-quality digital resource offering support and guidance to patients alongside the necessary in-person appointments.

The company’s technology aims to make evidence-based clinical nutrition accessible and culturally adaptable, addressing one of the biggest gaps in chronic-pain care: affordability and personalization.

Today, Healthnix partners with physical-therapy clinics in Texas, New York, and California, with additional collaborations underway with primary-care and pain-management providers nationwide. Maja’s ambition is to make Healthnix a billion-dollar health-tech platform that equips clinicians to deliver truly personalized, “food-as-medicine” care at scale in a way that aligns incentives, ensuring that physicians get reimbursed for providing more personalized care, which leads to better patient outcomes.

Enter AI for Chronic Pain Management 

Maja is a respected thought leader in the “food as medicine” movement, frequently invited to speak at major industry conferences on the topic of AI, nutrition, and whole person care in pain management. Among other events, she spoke at Vive in Nashville (one of the largest healthtech conferences globally), the Personalized Arthroplasty Society in Rome, the Food as Medicine Summit by BNMC in New York, and the Food as Medicine Summit in London. Maja and her co-founder, Karol, are also part of the coveted Agetech Accelerator by AARP, which accepts only a small number of companies it believes have the highest potential to transform healthcare for seniors in the US.

Maja’s background spans complex systems modelling (a topic on which she published her undergraduate dissertation earned at a prestigious University College London), philosophy of science, law, and AI product design, anchored by experiences at Goldman Sachs, Norton Rose Fulbright, and a London-based machine-learning start-up. She also helped launch the LawtechUK Sandbox, the first legal-tech accelerator funded by the U.K. Ministry of Justice – an achievement that showcases early in her career her ability to navigate complex regulatory landscapes and build high-impact programs.

Her own recovery from debilitating hip pain through nutrition gives her mission personal urgency. “When I couldn’t find effective treatment, I turned to data and nutrition – and after going through a very time-consuming process with pen and paper myself, I realized that technology I knew how to build could help millions recover much faster and have a much better experience, perhaps also avoiding unnecessary surgery,” she recalls.

Working Together for Solutions 

A large part of Healthnix’s approach is its collaborations and contributions, which advance the field of food as medicine. Having honed her ability to navigate complex enterprises during her time at Goldman Sachs and Norton Rose Fulbright, Maja has led Healthnix’s collaboration with the National Health Service back in London (resulting in pilots and feedback from dozens of clinicians), as well as with Cleveland Clinic directors Dr. Sara Davin and Dr. Steven Lupe to create a “food as medicine and whole person care” digital educational program for pain management, the first of its kind in the market. Leveraging her expertise in product development and first-hand patient experience, she designed the innovative but accessible curriculum and the digital product around it to create a solution she wished she had when she faced the prospect of hip surgery.

Previously, Healthnix participated in the selective South London Digital Health Evidence Bootcamp, joining only a handful of founders and companies chosen for their team’s exceptional profiles and the company’s potential to transform healthcare. This allowed Maja to build a relationship with a leading self-care researcher, Dr Austen El-Osta from Imperial College London (an advisor to the WHO on self-care), with whom they subsequently published (currently in peer-review) research about the challenges of using nutrition for osteoarthritis management, filling a much-needed information gap for food as medicine in primary care in the NHS. Insights from this research have subsequently informed product development at Healthnix and how Maja shapes the commercial and product strategy at the company today. Such active contributions to advancing scientific knowledge about food as medicine helped Maja gain recognition among doctors in the UK and led to Healthnix securing two NHS pilot programs to integrate “food as medicine” into primary care for osteoarthritis.

Building a Company for Scale 

Healthnix is backed by a strong team of experienced operators, engineers, and scientists. Their advisory board includes scientists who have published over 1,000 peer-reviewed articles. The co-founding team also includes COO Karol Waluszewski, with operations expertise from Amazon, who brings his operational and data analytics skills to ensure that Healthnix can turn clinical innovation into scalable impact. While Maja leads product vision and B2B partnerships across providers and academia, Karol oversees Healthnix’s operations, compliance, and partner implementation, ensuring the company’s solutions meet enterprise-level standards for reliability and efficiency. He has recently led launches of Healthnix physical therapy partnerships across Texas, New York, and California, and has also secured the company’s operational capacity to provide lab testing in all 50 States.

“Our partnership lets me focus on advancing our clinical and commercial collaborations, as well as on the wider company and product strategy, while Karol ensures we execute flawlessly,” Maja says. “That balance of vision and execution is essential to the growth of any early-stage company and particularly important in a regulated sector, like healthcare.”

Smart Nutrition on the Frontlines 

Through driving Healthnix’s research, partnerships, and investing in the capability to produce AI-driven insights for patients, Maja is carving out a new niche in digital health. The company’s goal is to make clinical nutrition a standard of care for chronic pain and other long-term conditions, offering data-driven tools that improve outcomes while reducing reliance on medication.

As patient demand grows and healthcare systems embrace prevention, Mazur and Waluszewski are positioning Healthnix at the forefront of a global shift: using technology to make nutrition medicine’s next frontier.