Ep. 8 - Zach Juliano: Sean's Bad Back and Phenomenological Physical Therapy

What happens when AI meets the body? In this episode of The Line, we sit down with Zach Juliano, physical therapist and owner of Home Team Wellness, to explore where AI fits — and where it doesn't — in the world of movement, rehab, and human healing.

Zach is the guy who got Sean back on the ice after herniated discs nearly ended his hockey career. After nine months at a generic PT clinic with zero improvement, six weeks with Zach changed everything. The difference? Zach doesn't treat pain where it shows up. He treats the whole body — watching how you move, asking about your life, understanding the way your work, your sport, and your daily routines shape the way your body breaks down and builds back up.

Zach uses AI for the business side of his practice — CapCut for social media content, ChatGPT for tightening up captions and posts. But when it comes to patient care, the line is firm. No AI treatment plans. No generic protocols. Every body is different, every injury has a story, and the textbook (or the chatbot) only gets you so far.

Sean put this to the test — he asked Claude about his back pain and got the same cookie-cutter advice his first PT gave him. Bird dogs. Crunches. Core work. The stuff that kept him stuck in a pain cycle for nearly a year. What actually worked was a practitioner who could see him, know him, and treat the root cause rather than the symptom.

In the breakdown, Sean and Matthew connect Zach's philosophy to phenomenology — the study of lived experience. Zach's approach to PT mirrors what phenomenologists have argued for decades: the body is not a machine with isolated parts. It is a whole, and understanding it requires attending to how a person actually moves through their world. Matthew draws a direct line between Zach's practice and the work of his doctoral supervisor, Stephen Smith, on movement and embodiment. The conversation pushes into deeper questions: What is the difference between a shared intellectual experience and a shared embodied one? Can AI ever understand a body it does not have? Why do we keep trying to give robots human bodies? And what does the gap between language and lived experience mean for the future of AI in healthcare?

This is the episode for anyone who has ever been treated like a number at a doctor's office and knows there has to be a better way.

You can find Zach @HomeTeamWellness on Instagram and at www.hometeamwellness.com

For us, you can join our conversation by checking out these links:

Sean's Substack Sean's Instagram Matthew's Substack Matthew's Instagram PEXE Lab Substack PEXE Lab Website Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.