DRY NEEDLING

Do we do dry needling at Backupuncture of Denver? Yes!

For a very long time, only acupuncturists used acupuncture needles. Acupuncture needles are different from other needles used in medicine. They are technically “filiform” — like wires, they are solid and thin without a cutting surface. Western biomedical needles typically were either hollow (to allow injections or to draw blood) or were to carry thread for sutures. 

In the past decade, however, there has been an explosion in the medical field, particularly in Physical Therapy, of something called “dry needling.” Dry needling got its name because, prior to the legalization of acupuncture in the United States beginning in the 1970s, hypodermic syringes were used in the technique but nothing was injected — hence the “dry” part. The origin of the term is attributed to Dr. Janet Travell. In her 1983 book, Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual, she uses the term dry needling to disambiguate it from performing injections of procaine anaesthetic when performing trigger point therapy. Hypodermic needles, as any child at a doctor’s office will tell you, don’t feel that great. Hence, dry needling didn’t really take off until practitioners began moving away from hypodermics and switched to relatively painless acupuncture needles. 

Once dry needling practitioners began using the same tools as acupuncture, the debate of what distinguished dry needling from acupuncture began to be more acute (from the Latin acus ‘needle’), so to speak. 

Acupuncture vs. Dry Needling

Acupuncturists have been exploring the use of our “dry needles” for over two millennia of recorded history. Hence, the theories and techniques have had a much longer time to develop. Acupuncture, through its theories of precisely stimulating and moving the qi or energy of the body (often now considered to be the neurological mechanism of acupuncture), encompasses much more than treating trigger points, or treating pain for that matter. Acupuncture has shown clinical results in everything from infertility to improving cardiac health. It’s well known for inducing deep relaxation and strongly affecting the autonomic nervous system. Acupuncture has even been used successfully in lieu of anaesthesia. 

Dry needling, on the other hand, is concerned with just needling trigger points, not how these relate to the entire body or health of the patient. It’s therefore a subset of acupuncture. The training of dry needlers reflects this. Typical education in dry needling is over the course of a few weekends, and practitioners can begin practicing immediately without any lengthly supervised internships. Acupuncturists spend three years or more practicing their technique and learning how to needle safely and effectively, including 1-2 years of supervised clinical internship. These are big differences! 

No matter what justification is used for choosing the points, they are the same points, and the needling technique can be identical, depending on the style of acupuncture. That’s why dry needling is in our scope of practice as acupuncturists in Colorado without any additional training. Those of us who specialize in pain tend to do additional training in “dry needling,” orthopedic acupuncture, or Sports Medicine Acupuncture, which all share in common the techniques of using of the larger guage needles with strong stimulation the intent of deactivating myofascial trigger points. The main difference is that dry needling classes are geared toward non-acupuncturists, and don’t include other techniques that consider the health of the whole body or non-local points that can enhance pain effects or be less intense than local points.

For additional information, you can read my blog on dry needling here.

There have been over 14,000 clinical trials of acupuncture, according to the Cochrane Review (in comparison, there have been 12,000+ for physical therapy and 1000+ for chiropractic). To look up research easily, here is a link to the NIH PubMed database of clinical trials and metanalyses.

Licensed Acupuncturists (L.Ac.) in Colorado are required to have either a Master's Degree or a Doctorate in acupuncture and/or oriental medicine, and have a minimum of 2500 hours of post-graduate training.