South Pointe Healthcare

Dry Needling

Do you have muscular pain symptoms? Trigger points in the muscle can be a major source of pain and restricted range of motion. Schedule an appointment to see how Dry Needling can help you reduce pain and improve quality of life.

Dry Needling

Do you have muscular pain symptoms? Trigger points in the muscle can be a major source of pain and restricted range of motion. Schedule an appointment to see how Dry Needling can help you reduce pain and improve quality of life.

What Is Dry Needling?

At South Pointe Healthcare we practice “Functional Dry Needling” (FDN), which is a technique that is used to find trigger points in the muscle and help relax those trigger points with the insertion of a needle. Trigger points can be a major source of pain symptoms and decreased range of motion in the effected and surrounding areas. 

Overall, this technique is excellent for treating dysfunction in connective tissue and musculoskeletal conditions, while relieving pain and improving overall muscle structure by strengthening motor weaknesses in the body. 

Techniques

The dry needling technique used will depend on the patient’s individual needs and the overall objective of the treatment. The techniques that our chiropractors and physical therapists primarily use is a cross fiber technique and needling with electric stimulation.

A cross fiber technique involves moving the needle side to side / back and forth to stimulate different areas of the muscle fibers. This will sometimes provoke a “twitch response”, which is the muscle reacting to the stimulation of the needle. Although the twitch response does not always occur, when it does, it is a positive sign of muscle stimulation.

Electric stimulation works excellently as both a diagnostic tool and treatment tool. The goal of electric stimulation is to increase neural activation to the muscle tissue. Often times, our chiropractors find that a patient’s soft tissue is unhealthy, which presents itself as the patient feeling the pulsing of the electric stimulus, but there will not be a visible muscle contraction.

When a muscle tissue is healthy, electric stimulation will produce involuntary shortening and lengthening of the muscle. When this is the case, the electrical frequency is slowly increased from zero, to the point where muscle tissue activation is seen, but the patient is still comfortable.

This extra stimulation helps jump start the muscles neural activation to restore and help maintain its health and function.

At South Pointe Healthcare, we use needling in conjunction with other rehab techniques such as physical therapy, chiropractic, and soft tissue massage to create the most benefit for our patients. 

Benefits Of Dry Needling

Functional Dry Needling is an excellent treatment option for patients how experience chronic pain symptoms. When left untreated over time, the body will begin to ignore chronic pain points. This results with the healing response in the affected area becoming almost completely shut off.

When dry needling is used to treat this type of chronic condition, it restarts the bodies healing response to areas that may have been ignored over time.

Besides chronic ailments, dry needling has seen much success with conditions such as:

  • Fibromyalgia
  • Myofascial pain syndromes
  • Neck, back, and shoulder pain stemming from muscular tissue
  • Disc herniation
  • Sports injuries

How Will I Feel After Dry Needling?

When a patient has trigger point dry needling, the effect of the needles is usually noticed immediately after the session. Most noticeable effects are the decrease in discomfort of myofascial trigger points and increased mobility. Most people experience soreness similar to what you would expect after a heavy workout. This soreness can last from 1-2 days but should not interfere with any of your normal daily activities. 

According to Health Line, and our in house physical rehab team, it is encouraged to keep active after a session and resume all normal activities including gym routine. To receive the maximum benefits of this needling treatment, it is important to exercise the affected area because of the improved neural and muscular health, to train your muscles around previous trigger points to work properly with newfound stimulation. 

Is Dry Needling The Same As Acupuncture?

These two techniques are vastly different, needling revolves around western medical principles and research, while acupunctures roots are based in traditional Chinese medicine. Acupuncture is similar in that they both use the same, very small needle.

Acupuncture focuses on directing the flow of “qi”, or energy, through the body. When looking at needling, its focus is on palpation findings (generating a twitch response), as well as motor weaknesses in the body. 

Clinic Hours

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Sunday

9:00am - 7:00pm

9:00am - 5:00pm

9:00am - 7:00pm

9:00am - 7:00pm

9:00am - 5:00pm

10:00am - 5:00pm

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Contact Info

Phone

(303) 665-8444

Fax

(303) 665-8448

Address

150 Old Laramie Trail E #120

Lafayette, CO 80026

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