All You Need to Know About Dry Needling Therapy
Dry needling is actually a kind of therapy that makes use on “non-injection” needling that makes use of a solid, filament needle similar to that used in acapuncture and aims to stimulate certain tissue parts in order to achieve specific . In contrast, “injection needling” uses a hyperdermic syringe to inject a certain agent such as saline, corticosteroid or a local anesthetic into a specific anatomical structure like the tissue in order to get the desired therapeutic effect.
The term dry needling is also used to differentiate the use of needling in a western physiological paradigm from the use of needling in an oriental paradigm which is referred to as acupuncture.
It should be understood that this kind of therapy is different from acupuncture. When you say acupuncture it is a Chinese therapeutic remedy which based its healing quality on the concept of Yin and Yang in the Chinese philosophy. What it does is it needles specific points that are part of the meridians. On the other hand, dry needling aims to lessen the effects of chronic muscle shortening through the use of needles.
There are a lot of dry needling schools of practice and they usually concern needling the myofascial trigger points in the body using the same needles used in acupuncture with the aim to deactivate and solve problems concerning certain trigger points.
What must be remembered about this method is that it has a lot of limitations and these limitations are the usual reasons why there are a lot of practitioners of dry needling therapy that could not deliver what their customers want. These limitations concerning the not so many techniques available and the dependency of the treatment on the trigger points. As a result, there are a lot of practitioners who do not use the method that much even if they started out being very excited about using the therapy.
The dry needling plus approach addresses many of the limitations of established dry needling practice by differentiating between a variety of needling techniques and applying them to specific changes identified in the tissue by means of skilled palpation and logical, range based physical assessment .
The dry needling plus approach demands a higher skill level of the practitioner than other approaches,however the rewards of investing time in attaining excellent assessment skills and needle technique are many.
In the hands of a skilled practitioner, dry needling can be used in most cases the majority of the time and with less energy expenditure on behalf of the practitioner and equal or better effect than other manual techniques currently being used. If practiced well there is also a remarkable absence of the “post treatment tissue soreness” often experienced by the subject following other manual therapy interventions.
As long as the practitioner understands anatomy sufficiently there are very few side effects. Side effects are very rare but when they do happen the most frequent and the most serious is that of a pneumothorax. This is where a needle pierces the lung leading to its partial or full collapse. This happens mostly when a needle is inserted into the Trapezius muscle in a certain way and too deeply.
