Sophia’s Profile

Sophia von Burg has over 30 years of experience as a registered physiotherapist with an interest in bone health and osteoporosis care in Hong Kong.

She completed her first class physiotherapy degree at London’s UCL in 1995. Her Honours research paper explored the differences ethnicity plays in fragility (low bone density) fractures. Since then, her passion for bone health has not abated.

She started her practice at The Middlesex Hospital in the UK’s NHS doing junior rotations and then moved to Hong Kong for a four year stint working for both The Matilda International Hospital and BET rehabilitative Pilates. During this time Sophia was a clinician in a research trial investigating the effect of exercise on low back pain. She took annual trips back to the UK to further her professional development and there took numerous courses in all areas of movement dysfunction. At this time she also had the opportunity in three consecutive years to work at the Hong Kong Open with elite men’s tennis.

In 2000, Sophia moved to Switzerland for six years and worked in private clinics using rehabilitative Pilates in both Geneva and Neuchâtel to treat persistent pain. Sophia returned to Hong Kong in 2006 where she continued to work with exercise rehabilitation and raise her family.

Sophia continues to elevate the quality of her physiotheraphy service. In 2020, she realised movement dysfunction training was helping her clients improve but not to the best that they could be. She then undertook a postgraduate course in strength and conditioning for physiotherapists from the UK to bring robustness and resilience to her clients. This strength and conditioning knowledge led her further, past the benefits to the muscular system and mental robustness to the added benefit it has on bone density. Sophia came across the 2017 research from Griffith University in Australia about heavy resistance and impact training for improving bone density. Until then no one had heavily loaded humans with low bone density for fear of injury, but these series of trials did with impressive results. To this end in 2021 through Prohealth Posture Plus Sophia became the first practitioner in Asia of the Onero™ programme. This programme is based on the protocol of the Australian trials. She is extremely thankful for an exercise based system to address osteopenia and osteoporosis in low bone density populations such as ultra athletes, peri/postmenopausal women, those with underlying conditions which affect bone and the elderly.

As a member of the UK’s “Better Clinician Project”, a collection of like-minded health care professionals guided by two of England’s leading physiotherapists, Sophia stays abreast of the global current clinical evidence base with weekly online reviews of the latest research findings and monthly tutorials on specific musculoskeletal diagnoses. Her memberships of both the HK Osteoporosis and Rheumatology societies allow her to stay abreast of clinical guidelines specific to Hong Kong and the Asia Pacific Consortium on Osteoporosis membership allows her to participate in quarterly case study reviews with leading physicians in the region.