Richard Ulm  0:05 

Hey everybody, Dr. Richard Ulm here and Dr. Bradley Muse from Columbus Chiropractic and Rehabilitation. Today, we wanted to talk to you about dry needling. So, this is something that has gotten a lot more popular here in the last probably decade, and it’s something that we use in the office quite a bit. So, we wanted to kind of explain to you where it came from, how we might use it. And then, we want to walk you through what an actual dry needling therapy would look like in case you’re sort of apprehensive with the needles.

Bradley Muse  0:31 

Yeah. So, first we want to talk about a little bit what is dry needling. And a lot of it stemmed from kind of mid-century, last century with people like Dr. Janet Travell, who was JFK’s physician. She began to figure out that using a hypodermic needle, what you would get in a typical injection with, she used that on some of these things called trigger points, well, then she could get the benefits that she want out of it without having to inject some kind of substance, hence the name, dry needling.

Richard Ulm  1:01 

Actually, we’re doing research, where they would test out an actual medication, and they found that they were getting the same… This was on a trigger point, and trigger points are focal areas within the muscle that are sensitive, and they produce symptoms, they might radiate. When your massage therapist is getting worked on the areas that are really, really sensitive, those are oftentimes these trigger points. We’ll talk about how we use dry needling for them. But they were doing research on that, and they found that the needles that didn’t have medication in them, the dry needles, were just as effective as the medication that they were actually testing. So, that’s where the name comes from.

Bradley Muse  1:38 

Right. And then as the years went on, they began to use smaller needles, which are actually often acupuncture needles, which are just monofilament, meaning that they have no hole through the middle of it like…

Richard Ulm  1:48

Teeny-tiny.

Bradley Muse  1:49

Yes. So, that then began to create this confusion, is there a difference between acupuncture and dry needling? So, there absolutely is. It uses the same tool, but there’s different philosophies or reasonings behind why we use them. So, acupuncture is based out of traditional Chinese medicine, it’s been around for thousands of years. But the way that we look at acupuncture or the way that it works is, oftentimes, it’s aiming at more systemic conditions. So, whether that be things like helping with the symptoms of cancer, smoking cessation, yes, they help some with like…

Richard Ulm  2:29 

Infertility. They treat basically a much, much wider list of conditions than dry needling.

Bradley Muse  2:36 

Right. And then, dry needling is just basically targeting the musculoskeletal system. So, we mentioned those trigger points. A dry needle into that specific trigger point can show things like changes in range of motion, decrease in muscle tone. Oftentimes, we can use it for things like inflammatory responses. But dry needling is mainly targeted at the musculoskeletal system, while acupuncture can be targeted at more systemic type conditions.

Richard Ulm  3:04 

Yeah. And we would use dry needling, essentially, to go after tight muscles and trigger points. Trigger points make muscles tight also, but they can produce symptoms as well, like achiness, and even a sharp pain, they can block normal range of motion. And so, we’re going to use dry needles, like we’re going to show you here in a second to go into the trigger points and it’s going to directly address that trigger point, whether it’s on the shoulder, or the forearm, or the hamstring, or whatever. And it gets that trigger point to sort of calm down or shut down, and then, oftentimes, that’s what sort of takes the pain away. So, it’s never an isolated treatment where you would come in and we’re only using dry needling, what we would do is we’re always using this in conjunction with something else; rehab exercises, soft tissue work, joint manipulation, joint mobilization, something else to speed up the process of recovery. So, it’s never done in isolation.

Bradley Muse  4:00 

Right. We’re using it to serve a purpose to the overall treatment approach. So things like the manipulation, the soft tissue, the dry needling, these are just things meant to be used in conjunction with the other things that we’re doing. So, it’s not a standalone treatment.

Richard Ulm  4:14 

Yeah. So, we wanted to take you through basically what a treatment is, and what it would kind of look like. So, I myself, I’m actually sort of not a super big fan of needles, but, because they’re filaments, they’re not actually needles, so you could fit 10 of these inside of the needle that will draw your blood. So, they’re very, very small, and it’s not necessarily painful. Occasionally, you’ll get a little bit of a pinch somewhere, but, for the most part, it’s very, very pain-free. So we’re just going to kind of walk Dr. Muse through it here a little bit, if want to lay down. So, we would have, in the course of the evaluation, we would have basically gone through and figured out which areas have trigger points or which areas are tight. And then, we’re going to use the needles as a way to address that tightness or address those trigger points. So the treatment kind of looks like this, you get these very, very small needles that I’m not even going to waste your time to try to show you here, but they are tiny, tiny, tiny. We have them in these little tubes so that when we sort of flick the needle, it quickly goes into the skin, and it’s not going to cause any problems. So, we would find a tight muscle in here, basically just hold it like this, and then we just sort of quickly flick it like that. Sometimes, you get a little bit of a pinch, sometimes you don’t, and then we just add a little bit, we’ll just put the needle into the depth that we want. And that’s kind of all it is. We’re not someone that puts a hundred needles in somebody, you’ll get that at some places, here, we’re going to do anywhere, maybe between 5 and 10, on average. And again, that’s all based on the evaluation we went through. So, we’re not just going to coat the area with needles, we’re to specifically target the areas that we think need it most. So, once it’s in, we might let it sit there for a little bit depending on the needs of the patient, the comfort level of the patient. But we’re just going to have to get in there and wait until the symptoms kind of resolve. And then we can sort of just pop the needle out. Occasionally, there’s a little bit of a pinch on the way out, but typically, it’s not very painful. So, that’s really it, I don’t know if you have anything to add?

Bradley Muse  6:20 

No. So, just to kind of give an idea of what I felt when he did that, was that initial delivery of the needle, where he kind of flicks it in, I didn’t even really feel the needle itself go in. I felt the pressure from him tapping that needle in. You may get like a deep, achy crampy feeling that lasts maybe two, three seconds. So then, I always give people a heads-up, “Sometimes you could walk out of here with a slight bit of soreness, not pain, but soreness as if we just stick a needle in you, sometimes you walk out and not feel it at all.” So overall, if you get any sort of side effects from dry needling, it’s very, very, very minimal and something that goes away in a pretty short period of time.

Richard Ulm  6:57 

Yeah. And we would never… If you came into the office and we think that you need to use dry needling and you’re not into that, that’s totally fine. We’ve got other tools that we can use, but we just find it to be a very, very powerful option for a lot of people. So, we were hoping just to sort of clarify that. Please comment below if you have any questions. We’d love to answer your questions about dry needling, and really any other kinds of therapy that we have here.

Bradley Muse  7:18 

Yeah. All right. Have a good one, guys.

Richard Ulm  7:20

Thanks, guys.

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