Integrating Feldenkrais® Concepts into Musculoskeletal and Neuromuscular Rehabilitation: Rethinking Impairment Based Treatment Approaches #261

MON, 31 OCT // 8:00 AM – 5:30 PM

Primary Content Focus: Other (Mind-body, systems based approach to human movement) This course is appropriate for practitioner health and wellness and for treating patients with neuromuscular and musculoskeletal conditions.

Secondary Content Focus: Pain

This didactic and experiential, pre-conference course is designed to present an interactive, mind-body, systems-based approach for decreasing pain and enhancing body awareness, mobility, balance, flexibility, motor and intellectual function. The course is especially appropriate for practitioners who work with patients with neuromuscular, musculoskeletal, and learning based impairments. Evidence for the Feldenkrais Method®, neuroplasticity, neurogeneration, manual guidance and visual and motor imagery will be discussed.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Describe basic concepts of the Feldenkrais Method®
Analyze available neurophysiologic movement, alignment, motion through the adjacent segments and through the skeleton
Discuss relationships between environment, task, and organismic constraints to movement and functional abilities
Apply Feldenkrais® concepts to ease, efficiency and fluidity of movement; orientation of self to the environment; and enhancing the sense of differentiation or integration of body segments to the whole for the health care practitioner and various patients
Discuss current evidence for the Feldenkrais Method®.

KEY WORDS

Neuroplasticity
Neurogeneration
Motor imagery
visual imagery
Neuophysiologic

FACULTY

Teresa Miller, PT, PhD, GCFP
Associate Professor, State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center

Dr. Miller is an alumna of the PT Program at Downstate (Class of ’81), and has been a full time faculty member in the Physical Therapy Program since 1993. Dr. Miller brings to the program more than 30 years of clinical practice experience in acute care, neurology, orthopedics, pediatrics, industrial PT and pain management. She integrates mindfulness and complementary and alternative therapies into her teaching and patient care.

Dr. Miller completed requirements for her Master’s degree in School Psychology from St. John’s University in 1993, with emphasis in psychosocial and behavioral underpinnings of disability. She received her PhD in Physical Therapy from Temple University in 2007 and has been a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner ® since 1999.

Dr. Miller has presented lectures, posters and platform presentations at national conferences and professional meetings and has lectured to community groups and hospital employees. She has co-authored articles published in peer referenced journals and three chapters on Feldenkrais in Complementary and Alternative Therapies in Rehabilitation, (2004, 2008, 2015 in print) edited by Carol Davies.

Dr. Miller’s research interests include decision making, outcomes and theoretical evidence for integrating various complementary and alternative therapies into PT practice, and the impact of manual guidance and motor and visual imagery on neuroplasticity.