If you're suffering pain or a loss of mobility from an injury or a stroke, you might want to give Feldenkrais a try.

Feldenkrais can't cure what ails you. But it can help your body adjust to whatever the problem is, and that can make you feel better and move better.

"Feldenkrais is not a cure all," said Dr. Russ Carter, a pain physician at Allegheny General Hospital. "If you have a structural problem, it's not going to cure that. But if you have neuromuscular imbalances, it can alleviate those."

Ralph Strauch, a Feldenkrais practitioner in Southern California, said "often what the medical model ascribes to pathology is really what the body does in response to the pathology."

For instance, Mr. Strauch said, many people suffer from back pain because their back muscles are chronically tense.

"The back muscles are tense because you don't pay attention to what the back is doing," he said. "It's a little like driving with one foot on the brake."

"What happens is when we get through life we'll have little insults or injuries along the way," Dr. Carter said. "The mind learns how to work around that problem. And unfortunately when the body has healed itself the mind continues to act in an habitual way. It doesn't go back to the way it was before the injury. It tends to get set in our neurophysiology."

An avid jogger, Dr. Carter, 58, decided to study Feldenkrais after he kept getting a sharp, stabbing pain in his left Achilles heel. Doctors couldn't explain why, but Pat Siebert, the Feldenkrais practitioner he saw in Austin, Texas, could.

"He explained to me that I had some tightness in my mid back that prohibited my spine from rotating properly, so there was muscle contraction that was keeping me from coming down properly on my left foot," Dr. Carter said.

Dr. Carter is halfway through the 1,000 hours of training required to become a certified Feldenkrais practitioner. The only licensed practitioner currently in Pittsburgh is his friend, Mark Shefsiek, 39, who practices at the Center for Integrative Medicine at UPMC Shadyside.

Mr. Shefsiek said he was attracted to Feldenkrais because of his background in martial arts, and because Feldenkrais cured him of migraine headaches he'd suffered since his youth.

"Where physical therapy is often looking at solutions for specific muscle groups, Feldenkrais takes a broader view," he said. There are some similarities to yoga, tai chi and Pilates, he said, but "we teach people to do things not based on a style, but on absolute function. We can take any movement, any problem anybody has out of isolation and put it into a fully integrated body movement."

Using gentle manipulations while his patient lies on a bench about half the height of a chiropractor's table, Mr. Shefsiek helps restore natural movement to his patients' bodies. He explains what he is doing as he does it, so his patients become more consciously aware of how their bodies move.

"It's such a powerful technique and approach," Dr. Carter said. "It's too bad so few people know about it."

One who is glad he discovered Feldenkrais is Richard Lynn, 54, of Squirrel Hill, who suffered a blow to the chest in an automobile accident four years ago. Months later, he had trouble breathing. It took a long time to diagnose his problem -- hypermobility in his ligaments causing his ribs to go out of place -- longer still to find relief.

"I spent three years lying on the living room floor," he said. "Basically, I couldn't go anywhere."

Since he started treatment with Mr. Shefsiek two months ago, he's regained normal mobility, Mr. Lynn said.