If you’re a Physical Therapist, dry needling combined with joint manipulation, if specifically targeted on regulating the autonomic nervous system toward homeostasis, is a game-changer in your toolkit.

Imagine being able to quickly relieve your patients’ muscle pain and improve their mobility with just a few precise techniques. Incorporating dry needling into your practice leads to faster recovery, higher satisfaction rates, and ultimately, more word-of-mouth referrals. Consequently, dry needling opens up new revenue streams as more patients seek out safe, effective, non-pharmacologic treatment to improve health and wellbeing.

• Pain Management:Dry needling & joint manipulation are powerful tools for relieving both chronic and acute impairment. They allow physical therapists to target the primary underlying cause of all chronic, idiopathic, & autoimmune impairment: Chronic Sympathetic Autonomic Hyperactivity.
• Improved Mobility:By addressing muscular tension, dry needling & joint manipulation to improve patients’ range of motion, which is crucial for restoring normal function. This is especially valuable for resistance to, and recovery from, surgery or injury.
• Quicker Recovery: Incorporating dry needling & joint manipulation into your treatment plan leads to faster recovery times. Patients experience quicker relief, which accelerates progress through rehabilitation and improves overall treatment outcomes.
• Broadened Skill Set:Certification in dry needling & joint manipulation sets you apart by expanding your therapeutic offerings and your ability to heal your patients. These techniques complement your existing manual therapy skills, allowing you to provide a more comprehensive plan of care.
• Increased Revenue Opportunities:Offering dry needling & joint manipulation as part of your practice opens up new revenue streams by attracting patients specifically seeking these advanced techniques.
• Address a Variety of Conditions:The combination of dry needling & joint manipulation enables you to treat a broader range of issues more effectively, including muscle tightness, tension headaches, sports-related injuries, pelvic health impairments, and more, improving the scope and quality of your care.

For Chiropractors, dry needling synergistically complements joint manipulation and other manual therapy. Dry needling allows you to directly touch and treat ligamentous, capsular, tendinous, and muscular issues that may not, or are more challenging to fully resolve through adjustments alone.

By offering dry needling, you not only expand your treatment options, but also boost your patients’ overall outcomes. Happy, pain-free patients are more likely to return and recommend your services, helping to grow your practice.

• Enhanced Pain Relief: While adjustments focus on normalizing joint position, a key component of regulating sympathetic autonomic hyperactivity, thoughtful dry needling focuses on inducing homeostasis through targeting and normalizing the tissues responsible for moving the joints, including the brain. This combination provides a more comprehensive and effective treatment approach for your patients.
• Improved Muscular Function: Dry needling helps relax tight muscles and increase blood flow, improving joint mobility and the ability to move said joints. This is particularly beneficial for patients with “idiopathic” treatment-resistant impairments whose autonomic nervous systems simply do not respond strongly enough to indirect treatment to acquire sufficient homeostasis to once again properly self-regulate.
• Better Patient Outcomes: Adding dry needling to your practice means you can offer a more effective, holistic treatment plan, resulting in quicker and more lasting relief for your patients. This leads to higher satisfaction, more referrals, and more revenue.
• Expand Treatment Options: Dry needling broadens your scope of care, allowing you to address impairments that adjustments alone may not fully resolve. This versatility enhances the value you provide to your patients.
• Boost Patient Retention: Satisfied, pain-free patients are more likely to return for continued care and recommend your services to others, helping to grow your practice and increase patient loyalty.
• Increase Revenue Potential: Offering dry needling as a service attracts new clients and opens up additional revenue streams.

As an Athletic Trainer, you’re on the front lines of helping athletes stay at peak performance. Dry needling and joint manipulation quickly improve blood flow, soft tissue mobility, range of motion, mental health, and more. This allows your athletes to better resist initial injury, recover faster from injury, and more frequently perform at their maximum potential. By adding this technique to your practice, you’ll be able to offer more comprehensive care, making you an indispensable part of any sports team. This not only enhances athlete satisfaction but also increases your value as a trainer, opening doors to more opportunities.

• Targeted Pain Management: Dry needling & joint manipulation helps alleviate muscle pain quickly, making it ideal for athletes dealing with tightness or soreness. This technique allows you to target specific areas that are affecting performance, providing fast relief.
• Faster Recovery: Athletes often need to recover quickly to return to competition. Dry needling speeds up recovery by reducing muscle tension, improving blood flow, and inducing autonomic nervous system homeostasis, allowing athletes to regain optimal performance more rapidly.
• Improved Range of Motion: By addressing muscle tightness, dry needling can help athletes improve their flexibility and mobility, which is crucial for peak performance in any sport. It allows athletes to stay agile and avoid injuries caused by limited range of motion and a chronically hyperactive sympathetic autonomic nervous system.
• Comprehensive Care: Adding dry needling to your practice allows you to offer a more complete approach to injury recovery and prevention. This comprehensive care not only benefits athletes, but also strengthens your role as a key member of their support team.
• Boost Your Professional Value: Having dry needling certification enhances your skill set and sets you apart from other athletic trainers, increasing your value to teams, coaches, and athletes. This can lead to more opportunities and greater recognition in your field.
• Expand Your Services: Offering dry needling as part of your treatment services can help you attract more athletes looking for advanced care, creating more revenue opportunities while improving athlete outcomes.

For Occupational Therapists, dry needling and joint manipulation enhances your ability to help patients regain function and reduce pain. Imagine being able to quickly release muscle tension and improve range of motion, making daily tasks easier for your patients. By incorporating dry needling into your practice, you’ll see faster recovery and higher patient satisfaction. This technique allows you to address musculoskeletal issues more effectively, which can result in better outcomes and more referrals.

• Pain Management: Dry needling and joint manipulation provide additional techniques to help alleviate chronic or acute muscle pain, allowing occupational therapists to address the underlying causes of discomfort more effectively.
• Improved Range of Motion: By releasing muscle tension, improving joint mobility, and reducing pain, dry needling and joint manipulation enhances patients’ mobility, which is crucial for helping individuals regain independence in daily tasks.
• Enhanced Functional Outcomes: Incorporating dry needling and joint manipulation into treatment plans leads to quicker recovery, enabling patients to return to their normal activities faster and with less pain, making your care more impactful.
• Expanded Skill Set: Gaining certification in dry needling and joint manipulation sets an Occupational Therapist apart by broadening their therapeutic repertoire, offering a more holistic approach to patient care.
• Increased Revenue: Adding dry needling and joint manipulation as a service attracts new clients and open up additional revenue opportunities.
• Treat a Wider Range of Conditions: Dry needling allows Occupational Therapists to better address issues such as muscle tightness, tension headaches, repetitive strain injuries, activities of daily living (ADL’s), and generalized autonomic nervous system homeostasis, the key to health.

Every tiny piece of normalized soft tissue, every normalized joint, every millimeter of normalized capsular tissue, removes stress from the autonomic nervous system and gives energy back to it, which improves cerebral blood perfusion and helps restore normal neuronal activity. If you restore enough energy to the autonomic nervous system, the mind and body break out of their inhibited state and are able to direct ample resources to fix ongoing problems. I think of it as running an antivirus program on the computer. Barring specific, ongoing injury, almost all “idiopathic” impairments have a root cause of autonomic nervous system energy deficiency and a departure from homeostasis. Rather than trying to fix specific impairments, if we try to fix the autonomic nervous system, we allow the brain and body to fix themselves. Trust me, our systems know how to fix themselves far better than we ever will. We just need to remove the stuff inhibiting them from doing so.

If the autonomic nervous system goes over your individual threshold for sympathetic activity, it loses its ability to self-regulate. This leads to our systems becoming energy deficient. Our cells start producing less energy per molecule of glucose processed, our body is less efficient at breaking down food to acquire nutrients, our systems and cells run out of energy, and everything gets hypoxic and inflamed. The mitochondria and other organelles in our cells run out of ATP, NADH, NAD+, O2, and other stuff, then our systems have to decide where to send and use the available energy because we no longer have enough to properly deal with everything going on. This is what leads to cancer, autoimmunity, diabetes, hearing loss, chronic pain, mental health problems, poor athletic performance, and any other nasty thing you can think about.

I regard needling as a brain treatment. A path to restore our innate superpowers. We are just using the soft tissues and nerves throughout the body as access points to affect various locations in the brain. The needle is a significant-enough amount of direct tissue stimulation to induce incredible homeostatic and neuroplastic alterations in the brain. The speed of complete recovery from unusual, random, “idiopathic” neurologic impairments I have observed consistently over my ten-year career never ceases to amaze me. Particularly with people who are not in good shape, do not eat well, do not supplement, and do not exercise. Nevertheless, thoughtfully performed needling leads the autonomic nervous system back from the abyss, into a realm where it can once again effectively self-regulate and maintain homeostasis.