PEAR and commercial web hosting

It seams to me that my web hosting company does not have PEAR properly installed even though they claim that it is. I come to this conclusion based on the fact that they are using a global php.ini file and its include_path is simply ".:". Is there any way to get the pear libraries working on a site like this or am I just going to have to look for someone else? Thanks in advance to anyone who can help Joaco