For anyone with back pain, the road to Fernleigh Academy is unrelentingly bumpy. Nestled in the mountain ranges of the Upper Hunter region of NSW, physiotherapist Sarah Key’s back retreat is only accessible by a 40-minute drive along a dirt track. And that’s after the four-hour drive or train trip from Sydney.“It requires a certain unshackling from the mould just to make the decision to come here,” says Key. “It helps break preconceived ideas and old patterns.”

Since 2006, Key and her associates have hosted five-day programs called “Back In A Week” for people with chronic back pain. The aim is to educate and treat guests in beautiful, comforting surrounds.

Fernleigh is a 5000-acre cattle farm owned by Key and her husband. The retreat is made up of two houses that from the outside look like a pair of grand country homes, with corrugated iron roofing and wide wrap-around verandahs. But one has been purpose built to house luxury guest suites while the other features an exercise room with ballet rail, yoga mats and a wall of mirrors.

During each day of the retreat, patients have physical treatments as well as lectures on spinal health and are taught Key’s system of daily exercises that promote a healthy back. But there are also expeditions to the surrounding mountain ranges, convivial meals and free time to get a massage or relax with a book on the verandah.

At $3900, the experience isn’t cheap but the meals and accommodation are high quality (with perfectly firm beds and pillows, essential for guests with bad backs) and there’s on average only five patients per retreat, with several hours’ contact with a physiotherapist each day. “I love looking after patients and I love putting homes together, so it seemed like a logical step to create a nurturing place with state-of-the-art information,” says Key. “To me that’s a pretty intoxicating chemistry.”

Like her houses, Key could be mistaken for being a country beauty from another era with her starched shirts, pearl earrings and jodhpurs. But Key is a physiotherapist with impressive credentials: she is the physiotherapist to the English royal family and has been treating people’s backs for four decades. And listening to her talk about helping people with back pain, her passion for it is mesmerising. “These people can be constantly on the merry-go-round of doctor shopping, getting more and more desperate,” explains Key. “If I, however, can have the time in a contained environment to give them unemotional information about what has gone on with their bodies — with anatomy, science — then they can have an evidence-based realisation, and that’s what therapy’s meant to achieve.”

Melody Talbot, 44, of Seaforth, NSW, came to a Back In A Week having had one session with Key at her clinic in Sydney. Diagnosed with scoliosis as a teenager, Talbot had led an active life and had four children but was now being told she would have to have major surgery: either spinal rods put in her back or her vertebrae removed and rebuilt. She wanted neither.