Acupuncture, Chiropractic and Dry Needling

Traditional Acupuncture

Acupuncture has long been used in China as a means to treat disease and has in recent years seen significant growth and acceptance in conventional Western medicine.

Dry Needling And Acupuncture

As chiropractors we use a form of acupuncture referred to as, ‘dry needling’, which is essentially pain relief acupuncture. We do not treat any other medical conditions like traditional Chinese acupuncturists would do.

We use dry needling as an adjunct to our chiropractic treatment to help release tension and pain.

For those people who do not like needles, we can use our low level laser therapy machine, which has a special probe for acupuncture treatment.

The good news is, it is completely pain-free!

If you need any further information on chiropractic treatment and how we use acupuncture, please give us a call or contact us here.

Chiropractic And Dry Needling

Dry needling is a form of therapy that many chiropractors use to help to reduce pain by stimulating so-called trigger points, or reflex points, in muscles by using acupuncture needles.

Low-Level Laser can also be used to stimulate these points using specific connection to the low-level laser unit, which can be the right type of treatment for you if you do not like needles.

Acupuncture and dry needling are very similar but there are some differences. For instance therapists who are trained in classical Chinese acupuncture often treat many other conditions apart from pain, following a system that uses so-called meridians which are energy lines throughout the body and also use many other diagnostic procedures to diagnose and to determine how they would treat.

The use of dry needling is focused on treating pain by inserting a needle at different points relating mainly to trigger points but sometimes also acupuncture points. In fact, the correlation of locations of trigger points and acupuncture points is more than 90%.

The main difference is that dry needling is for pain control whereas acupuncture is a treatment method that includes other medical conditions.

The term dry needling is derived from the fact that, initially, medical practitioners were using injections of painkilling substances into trigger points, but research found that there was no benefit in injecting anything into the trigger points. The effect was the same as just inserting a needle, hence the term dry needling.

The effect of dry needling and acupuncture is thought to relate to two possible reasons:

1. The stimulation of the needle triggers the release of endorphins (your body’s own opium) from the brain reducing the pain sensation,
2. And the other theory is the effect of the pain-gate theory, which is simply explained by the stimulation of one type of sensation, such as touch in movement, which will block pain signals.

Another method to treat trigger points is to use direct pressure using our fingers, which is also a very effective way to treat trigger points.

As we are all different, we respond differently to different treatments, it is therefore helpful to have more than one treatment method that we can apply to each patient.

Combining chiropractic manipulation and trigger point therapy (using either needles, low-level laser or direct pressure) is a great way to reduce pain and improve function!