Health Benefits Associated With Dry Needling

By David Sisk, DPT

La Plata Physical Therapy, Inc.

. http://www.laplatapt.com/

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Health Benefits Associated With Dry Needling

Dry needling is a modern, safe and effective form of therapy for the treatment of a wide variety of muscular, soft tissue pain, and nervous tissue conditions. It is a proven therapeutic modality to help treat and normalize soft tissue dysfunction including muscles, tendons, sensitized nerve tissue, and scar tissue formation post-surgical, repetitive, or from trauma. This form of treatment helps to restore physiological balance or homeostasis to help support biological self-healing and tissue repair. Dry needling can help to improve range of motion, joint bio-mechanics, and to reduce pain, inflammation, and to promote muscular and soft tissue healing.

Dry needling is based on neuro-anatomy and modern scientific study of the muscular, skeletal, and human nervous systems. During treatment, a very fine, solid filament needle is inserted through the skin and into the areas that are considered relevant to each person’s condition.

With deep dry needling, the needle is guided toward the trigger point until the physical therapist feels resistance or notices that the patient has a local twitch response. A local twitch response is a spinal cord reflex that creates an involuntary contraction that can be triggered by a snapping palpitation or penetration with a needle. Research shows that the local twitch response is the result of an alleviation of symptoms/dysfunction due to a release of immune system related chemicals.

When the patient has an involuntary twitch response, that suggests that the needle has hit the right spot.

With superficial dry needling, the physical therapist will try to alleviate trigger point sensitivity with these shorter intervals of therapy, repeating this process until he/she notices a difference. Superficial dry needling is the chosen technique for patients who cannot tolerate deep dry needling or who cramp or become stiff easily.