When you insert needles into acupuncture points, it can help stimulate nerves, muscles, and tissue in your body. This stimulation then encourages the body to release certain beneficial chemicals, such as endorphins and serotonin.
Endorphins are the body’s natural form of painkillers and your brain releases these chemicals at times of pain and stress. Serotonin is a chemical that can affect your mood, emotions and behaviour. It can also provide pain relief. There is increasing scientific evidence to show that needling is effective for headaches, arthritis and a leading research body has published findings concluding that “dry-needling appears to be a useful adjunct to other therapies for chronic low-back pain”.
Dry needling targets muscle tissue, and its nerve connections, so any conditions where muscle pain or tightness is an issue could potentially benefit. This may include such things as neck tension, headaches, back pain, tennis elbow or shoulder conditions.
Dry needling is very safe for most people (it should not be used during pregnancy, or in a few other medical situations). The needles are very fine, and you barely feel them go in. Once the needle is in, people sometimes feel some aching; others feel not much at all. On occasion the needle may cause a small muscle twitch, which is a great sign that the needling will have a positive effect on relaxing the muscle.
Dry needling targets trigger points in muscles. A trigger point is a hypersensitive region within a muscle (like those tender ‘knots’ or lumps that you can feel when you are stressed!). When the needle is inserted into the trigger point, it acts to ‘jump start’ the muscle and its nerve supply. This usually results in a reflex relaxation of the muscle.In traditional acupuncture, the needles are not necessarily placed into trigger points, but rather points along energy channels in the body.
These ‘meridians’ or energy channels follow the eastern philosophy, and are therefore not in regular anatomy texts. I am sure that acupuncture can be very helpful, but the specificity and science of dry needling suits my personal belief system better.
If you are a needle phobe, you have two options. The first is to give dry needling a miss. There are other ways that a Chiropractor can help with your condition.
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