My Beef With Dry Needling

All right, welcome everyone to the next episode of the Redefining Physical Therapy Podcast.

I’m your host, Doctor Scott Gray and so in this episode, I want to talk a little bit about dry needling and, you know, I’ve taken several courses with dry needling, we use it in our practice.

I use it in my practice but here’s my beef with dry needling: I just find that so many clinicians think that it’s the end-all-be-all, um, and no needle certain patients and demographics of people, maybe they have stenosis, tendinopathy, any sort of bio factual pain, or any nerve entrapment.

But at the end of the day, our tissues typically heal with movement and my other beef is dry needling doesn’t really fix the cause, right?

It’s just, usually the symptom we’re putting out so if someone comes in with postural pain, you know, and you needle some of the muscles that are elongated or locked long, you may kind of, you know, the trigger points which is obviously another hot topic.

Yeah, I’m all for needling it, uh, and, and, you know, getting a twitch response and getting those muscles to relax and all that sort of thing but, if you’re not following that up with maybe thoracic extension or CT junction manipulation, you’re not stretching it out.

Some of the lap muscles, pec muscles, pec minor, and doing some strengthening, you’re really doing, you know, clients and patients a disservice.

The same thing goes for, like, you know, people that have, you know, spinal stenosis which is away, right, and we, we want to do needling of electric, um, to the areas and it’s, it’s good, you know, it gets people feeling better but you need to follow that up with movement.

Maybe open up the frame in patients who maybe strengthen the muscles around, uh, that knee joint that has arthritis or hip joint, right?

Or even the facet joints, um, but then we also need to kind of just figure out well, why did it occur, right?

So, if someone has facet arthritis, you know, you need to look back at the hip is that, is that, do they have a hip extension, do they have endorsal flection, do, are they stuck in an anterior pelvic tilt and due to weak abdominals and it’s compressing the facet joints.

Um, those are things that we really still need to uncover and, um, address, right?

Dry needling is a good adjunct and treatment option for some of our patients, there still needs to think about how we’re going to improve function, uh, long-term, right?

I think dry needling sometimes can just be a quick-term, quick-, you know, quick response to put out a fire and, but we also need to, you know, address the root cause of it and get them back moving, um, sooner than later ’cause our, at the end of the day, motions, lotion and that’s how our body functions so there you have it.

Use dry needling to help get your patients moving but you still need to address the route cause of the pathology.