I am a Doctor of Physical Therapy with over 30 years of experience.  I first became interested in learning how to dry needle after having received the treatment by a colleague in a formal treatment setting following a neck injury 4 years ago.  I was unable to fully reduce my own symptoms with self-treatment, nor with manual treatment from non-dry needling colleagues.  Dry needling, in just three sessions, allowed for increased effectiveness of the same treatment approaches and soon thereafter the movements I used for self-treatment fully reduced my symptoms.  Without dry needling I am quite certain I would not have been able to successfully utilize movement-based therapy to fully reduce my pain and return to full functional levels.  I would have probably continued down a path towards more expensive, less self-reliant treatment (ie, pharmaceuticals, surgery, etc.)

I then registered for dry needling courses (at a cost of nearly two thousand dollars to my employer) and underwent the 54 hours of training required by the Commonwealth of VA in order to allow me to practice dry needling on my patients.  Since completing the training, I have helped hundreds of people overcome musculoskeletal problems in much the same way that I experienced relief.  I have patients come to me specifically for dry needling because of the relief they get, often in a short time period of 3-5 visits.

 I give my patients, both verbally and in writing, a clear statement that I am not an acupuncturist and that I am not performing acupuncture.  In fact I often tell my patients that I know very little about the Chinese medicine principles that are the basis for acupuncture treatment.  As stated in a paper by J Dunning et al (Dry needling: a literature review with implications for clinical practice guidelines [Physical Therapy Reviews Aug. 2014]:  "...dry needling neither attempts to move qi along meridians, nor does it rely on diagnoses from traditional Chinese acupuncture or Oriental medicine."  

What I do know is how to use dry needling effectively as an adjunct to movement-based mechanical therapy.  Dry needling is the use of a monofilament needle to mechanically irritate muscular trigger points. This mechanical manipulation of muscle fibers in a trigger point has been shown on ultrasound imagery & tissue biopsy to allow for the clearing of neurochemicals that accumulate in the motor end points of aberrent muscle fibers and become noxious (pain-inducing) stimuli, among other effects. 

Since PTs in this state have had the opportunity to engage in learning the technique and delivering it to their patients for many years already, I feel that new regulations taking away this treatment tool and robbing our patients of a very effective means of reaching rehabilitation goals would be detrimental to the health care system in the Commonwealth of Virginia.  In an era of opioid overusage and addiction, it does not make sense to remove a non-pharmaceutical means of pain relief for patients in Virgnia who need--and want--to use dry needling instead of drugs.  In reality, the question here should not be whether or not this practice should be taken out of physical therapists' scope of practice, but whether or not dry needling training can be incorporated in to doctorate-level physical therapy school curricula so as to provide many more PTs in the health care system who are able to deliver this safe and effective means of pain relief.