Acupuncturists have to undergo four years of intense training to even begin to understand the medicine enough to be able to use it for helping patients that come in to see them. Giving the practitioners of any other type of medicine the same scope of practice - albeit under the conveniently renamed and rebranded title of "dry needling" - puts patients at risk, and puts the field of acupuncture and its practitioners in jeopardy from any injuries received by these undertrained (in point location, needling knowledge, technique, and related skills) as the average layperson does not differentiate between dry needling from someone with weeks or months of training and acupuncturists who studied theory and practiced needling for years before ever laying hands on a patient. This is nothing more than a thinly veiled maneuver to "legitimize" acupuncture by co-opting the medicine as it has been practiced for thousands of years, and it is patients and acupuncturists who will suffer with this lowered standard of training.