We at the Iowa Association of Oriental Medicine and Acupuncture want to reiterate what your Board has likely already heard many times: dry needling is acupuncture, and must be treated as such under the law. The State of Virginia already licenses and regulates practitioners of Acupuncture, and any professionals wanting to perform Acupuncture must be held to the same standards and laws as Acupuncturists.

IAOMA has adopted the following Position Points on this topic:

Our Primary Assertions

1. Acupuncture is the use of an acupuncture needle (a filiform needle) for therapeutic purpose.
2. Dry Needling also defines itself as the use of a filiform needle for therapeutic purpose.
3. Acupuncture and Dry Needling as terms are frequently used interchangeably by medical doctors, acupuncturists, physical therapists and others. Dry Needling is often called “Biomedical Acupuncture” and “Dry Needling Acupuncture.”
4. Acupuncture and Dry Needling are indistinguishable from each other from a regulatory and legislative standpoint. The law, rules and regulations that govern acupuncture must also be the law, rules and regulations that govern Dry Needling, since they are the same.

Our Purpose in Presenting These Points

1. Our interest is in ensuring that those who use acupuncture needles are properly trained in vetted academic programs with properly determined curricula, supervised by qualified instructors, and certified via psychometrically sound testing by a third party national organization to use this tool (acupuncture needle).
2. The public needs to have clarity and assurance that the practitioner from whom they are receiving care has had the appropriate training, clinical supervision, and passed third party national exams prior to laying hands on a patient. This should hold true regardless of practitioner type.

  Educational Standards Must Be Upheld

1. There currently are no independently vetted training programs for Dry Needling, no established and validated Dry Needling curricula, no means of assessing the competence of teachers in the field, and physical therapists are beginning to practice this invasive, incisive procedure with as little as 24 hours of classroom time. As a measure of perspective, the industry standard for medical doctors to practice Acupuncture is 300 hours of training with examination, and Licensed Acupuncturists require a minimum of 1365 hours in didactic and clinical acupuncture training.
2. Existing standards for training, practice and certification in acupuncture already exist, are well vetted, and provide the best benchmarks for other professions wishing to incorporate acupuncture into their scope. Dry Needling cannot be held to different standards or the assurance of safety and proper training will be lost.
3. Examination in acupuncture, by any name, should be mediated by a third party certifying organization approved by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA).

Current opposition to the practice of Dry Needling Acupuncture by non-Medical Doctor, non-Acupuncturist practitioners should not be considered a ‘turf war,’ but rather a reflection of concern for objectively verified, minimal competency standards that protect the public from substandard and dangerous invasive medical procedures.

Thank you.

(For more information visit our association website, www.iaoma.org, the national acupuncture certification commission’s website, www.nccaom.org, the national center for acupuncture safety and integrity website, www.acupuncturesafety.org. In those places you will find accounts of injuries caused by the improper use of acupuncture needles by inadequately trained “dry needlers” as well as information on the rigorous standards of education and competency required for licensed acupuncturists.

Email questions or comments to IAOMAonline@gmail.com)