Dry Needling is a specific treatment technique that uses a solid filament needle to treat muscle trigger points which are creating pain and discomfort.
A muscle trigger point is a highly localized, hyper-irritable spot in a palpable, taut band of skeletal muscle fibers. These muscle trigger points - which are located throughout the human body - play a role in producing and sustaining feelings of pain.
How Dry Needling Works
The mechanical stimulation of the muscle produces a local twitch or rapid depolarization of muscle fibers. After this process the muscle activity dramatically reduces resulting in relaxation and decrease in pain and dysfunction. This decrease in pain is related to the removal of muscular compression on joint, nerve and vascular tissue. Occasionally, insertion of the needle will also reproduce "referred pain" symptoms. This is often a positive sign confirming the trigger point as being the cause of the pain.
Your Plan of Care
Dry Needling is prescribed as a part of an overall care plan. At Thomas Physical Therapy, Dry Needling is a natural extension of quality hands- on therapy. To be effective, Dry Needling is a part of a comprehensive care plan; it is another very specific tool to reduce pain and help patients to better tolerate their physical therapy and tailored exercise plan.
Successful Dry Needling must be administered by a highly skilled physical therapist, with advanced training in anatomy and musculoskeletal function and dysfunction. At Thomas Physical Therapy, only our most experienced manual physical therapists are selected and trained to perform Dry Needling therapy.
Dry Needling does not replace the hands-on approach to physical therapy but will be an adjunct to our current high standard of care.
It is another very specific tool to reduce patients' pain which will then allow them to tolerate their exercises much better.
Dry Needling vs Acupuncture
While Dry Needling uses the same tool as acupuncture - it has a different theoretical purpose. Dry Needling is based on traditional, studied and tested practices of Western Medicine to restore normal muscle function. Traditional acupuncture practitioners follow Eastern Medicine's key principle of holistic treatment, and is based on normalizing the energy imbalance, or Chi, in the body to cure syndromes. Dry Needling targets trigger points and myofascial dysfunction to facilitate parasympathetic balance.
