Allowing athletic trainers to perform dry needling would be like allowing them to prescribe medications or perform root canals. Besides the serious danger of needling without appropriately repetitive guidance on how to avoid pneumothoraces or arterial puncturings, there are the less grave dangers of performing a medical modality without understanding the medicine it derives from—which is to say that relatively mindless stimulation of trigger points in one part of a muscle can cause harm to another part distally or proximally on the same neuromuscular vessel, which athletic trainers are not formally educated in. 

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