Dry Needling
When the groundbreaking “Trigger Point Manual” by Travel and Simons was published, Myofascial pain was rigorously explored muscle by muscle. The tightest place in a tight muscle was called a trigger point and a syringe with medicine was used to resolve the trigger point. Doctors then realized you didn’t need the medication to make the muscle un-spasm and go into ease/ full resting length. Using a syringe without medication achieved the same effect and was called dry needling. A syringe is large with an internal bore and a cutting edge while an acupuncture needle is slender like a pine needle and can make a muscle un-spasm with less tissue damage and so became the preferred tool to deactivate a myofascial trigger point. But the name dry needling stuck because acupuncture uses poetic language and dry needling is science.
The human body has gotten tight and sore in the same ways for 1,000’s of years. There is an over 80% correspondence between traditional acupuncture points and trigger points, i.e. they are the same thing. Thousands of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese etc. acupuncturist over 1,000’s of years must have needled a trigger point once or twice and called it acupuncture. But perhaps if you can explain a phenomenon more exactly, what went before didn’t exist or have validity. And so folks denigrate acupuncture as unscientific or make specious claims that acupuncture is surface and dry needling is deeper in the muscle. No one could needle deeper or more rigorously than my Chinese teachers!
The point is that acupuncture and dry needling are sometimes so close as to be indistinguishable. There are great and mediocre practitioners of every stripe. Acupuncturists have 1,600 hours of needling training and years of supervised training and continuing education, while in Georgia the legislature keeps introducing laws to let anyone from athletic trainers to occupational therapists dry needle with less than 40 hours of training. I would rather a voodoo shaman inheritor of an ancient scholarly tradition with 1,600 hours of training needle me rather than someone newly loosed from a weekend course. And that’s a fact, a scientific fact.
