To All Who Read This:

?This current open forum is a wonderful action.  It is nice to read and see comments.  American Democracy at its’ finest.

I will start off by saying that as both a practitioner and a patient of Dry Needling, Dry Needling is both safe treatment & a beneficial modality performed & administered by Physical Therapists.

For a COMPETING Medical Group of Practitioners aka ACUPUNCTURISTS to lobby & state that Dry Needling is unsafe as performed by Physical Therapists is both Libel (make false and damaging statements about) & Unprofessional. 

One, after performing a search PubMed.gov with the keywords of Dry Needling AND unsafe AND physical therapy, ZERO articles appeared.  In my 10 years of practice, we have yet to see an injury from a Physical Therapist performing Dry Needling that required medical attention.  But Acupuncturists claim it is unsafe for Physical Therapists which you can determine is unfounded, untrue and thus libel!

Two, Acupuncturists claim Physical Therapists are unsafe but the research shows otherwise as shown in the following 2 articles.

A 30-year review (1980–2009)3 of 115 published articles from Chinese literature cited 296 traumatic injuries, 150 vasovagal episodes, 9 infectious complications, and 14 deaths. PTX (n=201) was one of the most frequent adverse events. Other traumatic events included: subarachnoid hemorrhage (n=35), abdominal organ injuries (n=16), and spinal epidural hematoma (n=9).

And, similar findings were also noted in a separate 54-year review (1956–2010) of Chinese literature, which discussed 167 articles.4 Again PTX, 30% of the reported cases, was the most common traumatic adverse event. Over the last decade, Western literature has also reported numerous adverse events.5–18 A large-scale Western study involving 190,924 patients over a 6-month period found 0.024% (n=45) of these patients experienced death, an organ injury, or required hospitalization.

Finally, one competing group of practitioners, Acupuncturists, are trying to restrict medical treatment to the Commonwealth of Virginia inhabitants.  Since Dry Needling was approved to be perform safely by Physical Therapists, the inhabitants of Virginia of been feeling better, moving better, and able to return back to life.

So, after looking at the research, there is NO basis for the claim by Acupuncturists that it is unsafe for Dry Needling to be performed by Physical Therapists.  ??I hope you will take time to consider these false allegations & accusations being stated and consider how much good and benefit Physical Therapists provide not only with Dry Needling but their treatment strategies as a whole.