Our body has an ability to heal far beyond what we often imagine. However, life keeps moving while we are healing, and we often stress our body while it’s trying to recover by moving in compensatory rather than functional patterns. This can lead to less than optimal tissue remodeling and chronic scar tissue.

This is why physical care when recovering from an injury makes for far better outcomes - it helps tissues reconstruct functionally through integrating mindful movement into our healing process. However, even if we do develop dysfunctional scar tissue in our healing process (which can block blood flow, pull on nerves and fascia and create long lasting deep aching or referral pain), with a little stimulation in the right way, our body can remodel it again into a more functional structure!

Dry Needling can be a very effective and quite painless technique for treating longstanding issues that traditional body work has not been able to resolve. Dry needling is based on modern neuroanatomy and physiology and is typically used to treat musculoskeletal pain, including chronic pain, sports injuries, and muscular tension. This technique is performed by trained healthcare professionals who have completed specialized training in dry needling. The goal of dry needling is to stimulate the body's natural healing mechanisms, including pain reduction and tissue repair, through the use of thin needles placed in precise locations to create functional tissue motion.

Dry needling is not only beneficial for individual muscle or tissue dysfunction, but also for a wide range of conditions, including: whiplash-associated disorders, cervicogenic headaches, tension-type headaches, migraine headaches, rib syndromes, facet joint syndromes, cervical radiculopathy, mechanical neck pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, shoulder impingement syndrome, lateral epicondylalgia, and temporomandibular dysfunction. The most recent evidence underpinning the mechanical, hypoalgesic (central, segmental, peripheral), neurophysiologic, chemical, and hormonal effects of dry needling is widely available.

Techniques include, but are not limited to, dry needling of taut bands of muscle (i.e. trigger points), peri-neural dry needling and needle puncture of tendons, ligaments, musculotendinous junctions, teno-osseous junctions, and bone (i.e. “periosteal pecking”) as essential components of musculoskeletal needling practice. More specifically, peri-neural and peri-vascular dry needling are for the purpose of improving microcirculation and disrupting fibrosis in chronic neurogenic pain conditions (e.g. an impacted median nerve in carpal tunnel syndrome). Dry needling is certainly a lot more than sticking needles in trigger points!