I don’t know where you are, but around here they have classes at the local city college.

And I got that Feldenkrais used for 5 bucks, and I love it…

I’ve tried looking locally for an Alexander Technique practitioner but all the people I’ve been able to find also do Chiropractic, Reflexology etc etc. The usual alt. med. litany. I don’t think I’d feel comfortable in that kind of situation (and inclined to argue).

I’d never heard of Feldenkrais. I’ll look it up.

Eh, I was being cute. Each of us has his his preferred heuristics, just as each of us makes different choices about what to shrug at.

I looked into it some years ago on the recommendation of a doctor, who suggested (this was before the Internet became very popular) that I go to a health food store and look at the bulletin board for either Alexander Technique or Feldenkrais practitioner (the recommendation came of the phone, btw, the doctor refused to even see me after consulting with the doctor who had recommended me to him, after I’d driven up to norther California to see the latter; the former told me “There’s nothing wrong with you!” even after I told him that the previous weekend I’d tried practicing my sax for the first time in a year – on his recommendation – which caused a loud snap that caused my arm to suddenly become weak, leaving me with a painful purple welt on my shoulder that appeared the next day; incidentally, the northern California guy had also referred me to a chiropracter, whom I refused to see because I’d read some bad things about chiropractic in Consumer Reports, but I digress). My understanding of Alexander Technique is it’s essentially and older and less-developed version of Feldenkrais, which was influenced by it.

Although I did have a session with a Feldenkrais teacher who had learned it, if I recall correctly to manage her muscular dystrophy (she had been recommended to me by a Feldenkrais-trained PT who’d said she couldn’t see me because she was “booked up”) I actually only started to learn about Feldenkrais fairly recently, in part because not long after that I had an accident that further screwed up the body part that had already been troubling me (my arm, primarily), which ended up taking me another 11 years to fix, in part due to the lies and/or obfuscations of a series of sugeons (3 in Korea, 1 at a big university hospital in L.A., whose X-rays of me somehow disappeared by the time I finally switched to the surgeon who finally managed to fix it without screwing up, after telling me that my arm was still in a non-union state, and the humerus was “as soft as an apple,” which would strike me as being in conflict with my previous surgeon’s suggestion that I deal with it by swimming).

In the meantime someone finally wrote an excellent self-help Feldenkrais book called “Awareness Heals,” which would probably have been better titled, “Awareness Helps You Manage Your Pain and Related Symptoms,” that isn’t as catchy.

Tried the Alexander Technique?

As far as the earnings it would certainly make sense that primary care physicians would make less. I did mention of course that traditionally DOs do go into family med But I think using the phrase “lower echelons of medicine” regarding family practice/primary care is a bit silly and careless.

There’s definitely a contingent of physicians out there that would describe DOs the way PhysiPhile mentioned – those physicians usually are the ones that have never worked with one.