Action | Practice of dry needling |
Stage | Proposed |
Comment Period | Ended on 2/24/2017 |
It is time to stop allowing acupuncture to have any medical or legal association with "dry needling". Legally a provider must bill and allow a procedure to either be paid or denied by a subscriber's health insurance. As such a provider must best match the procedure performed by the associated cpt code. The procedure of "dry needling" injections by any profession, is when inserting a needle utilizing it as the stimulating agent, into a trigger point to elicit a twitch response. This twitch response is to create the physiological change required to deactivate the hyperirritable loci or trigger points in the muscle. The medical definition of an "agent" is "an active force" or substance. The needle is "tapped" or injected into the muscle and trigger point. The only reason acupuncture needles are being used by ALL professions when performing trigger point "dry needling" is to lessen the severity of any discomfort to avoid the need of a chemical substance in an injection.