I practice acupuncture in New Jersey. According to the our state laws, "Acupuncture is the stimulation of points by the insertion of needles (plus adjunctive therapies)." "Physical Therapy is intervention by means of manual therapy techniques (plus mechanical modalities)."
PT's are not licensed to insert needles. Those that claim they are doing dry needling are not using "PT needles," they are using acupuncture needles.
My recollection is that the term "dry needling" resulted from the abandonment of fluid filled hypodermic needles. Dr. Janet Travell, a cardiologist, noted that the heart pain that some of her patients were experiencing was the result of tight pectoral muscles (trigger points).
Injecting lidocaine via hypodermic needles treated the pain. It was later discovered that using the needle without pain medication was just as effective. This was called dry needling.
Dr. Mark Seem, of the Tri-State College of Acupuncture, conferred with Dr. Travell about using acupuncture needles (much thinner) to treat trigger points. This was very effective.
Those of us who graduated from his school had many, many hours of practicing this style, plus the Clean Needle Technique procedures.
It in an insult to our knowledge and experience that anyone with much less hours of instruction can be allowed to use acupuncture needles. This treatment should only be allowed within the scope of practice of acupuncture.
Virginia E. Mills, MS, LAc, CC
New Jersey
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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