Benefits of Dry Needling: A Focus on Neurology for Your Pain

Have you heard of dry needling?

Most people have heard of acupuncture. Acupuncture has been around for thousands of years, largely unchanged since its inception. It focuses on pain reduction by addressing Eastern medicine concepts like “meridians” and “qi” through needle insertion. I won’t pretend to fully understand what those mean. It does feel strange, however, that in the ever-changing world of science, acupuncture doesn’t seem to progress with the times.

Western medicine has been yearning for a more objective, scientific approach to acupuncture – enter dry needling.

Dry needling involves the insertion of small, sterile, non-medicated needles into the skin to address pain and dysfunction, based off your musculoskeletal and neurological systems. Many people have experienced dry needling to address muscular pain, with their physical therapist (PT) focusing mostly on the musculoskeletal system. Most PT’s approach dry needling this way: “You have calf pain, so let’s dry needle your calf muscles.” I’m here to tell you that focusing solely on the musculoskeletal system is a lazy and incomplete way of treating.

At Premier Physical Therapy, we perform neurologic integrative dry needling.

Let’s revisit the calf muscles. How do you know you have calf pain? To put it simply, one of your calf muscles (gastrocnemius) is unhappy, so it communicates that message electrically through the nerve that innervates the muscle (tibial nerve) and the overlaying skin (sural nerve and saphenous nerve). This message eventually finds its way up the leg to the sciatic nerve, which itself comes from the spinal nerve roots L4, L5, S1, S2, and S3. From there, it goes up the spinal cord to the brain, which your brain then interprets as pain. And all of this happens in milliseconds!

Neurology is a difficult topic, one that is often poorly understood by physical therapists. As a result, many PTs shy away from it. But at Premier Physical Therapy, we embrace it! We use our neurological knowledge and experience to your advantage, to treat you from all angles.

So how does the neurological system relate to dry needling? If dry needling is determined to be an effective option for you, your dry needling treatment must be integrative. This involves treating the musculoskeletal system and its underlying neurology. The insertion of needles strategically reduces the intensity and frequency of pain signals being transmitted up the nervous “highway” system. This then reduces your pain. There have been numerous high-quality research studies performed in the last 20 years that support these practices.

For calf pain, it is not good enough just to dry needle where the calf is experiencing pain. We also need to trace the neurology above and below the pain. To be thorough, we would dry needle where the sciatic nerve originates at the lumbosacral spine and along the length of the sciatic, tibial, saphenous, and sural nerves, both in the thigh and below the calf as the nerves approach the foot and ankle.

This approach gives the best opportunity of success with pain reduction. Many patients experience some pain relief somewhere between immediately and 48 hours after treatment. And the best part about it is that it comes with less soreness compared to musculoskeletal-focused dry needling; it takes less of a stimulus to only affect the nerve compared to moving the needle back and forth in a painful muscle!

Dry needling is available to all Premier PT patients. At the end of the day, neurologic integrative dry needling is a tool in the toolbox, with other options including manual therapy, neurological-focused exercise, and biomechanical analysis. It gives you a leg up to maximally improve upon your pain in a safe, long-term capacity, returning you to your activity of choice more quickly.

Quality of life is everything. If we can use dry needling to help improve your quality of life, everyone wins.