BioMedical Acupuncture & Dry Needling

Acupuncture is performed by inserting and manipulating fine needles into various points on the body to relieve pain.

The needles produce small lesions that activate the injury response mechanism in the body that promotes healing, immediately initiating tissue repair and local analgesic effect. Biomedical Acupuncture is based on three clinical protocols:

1. Standardized
2. Reproducible – results and procedures are reliable and reproducible.
3. Predictable – doctor can accurately predict patient response, number of treatments needed, if and when symptoms might return.

Biomedical Acupuncture relieves pain quickly and offers many other clinically proven benefits such as: Increased circulation, muscle relaxation, the release of anti-inflammatory biochemicals and it stimulates faster healing.

• Arthritis
• Joint Pain
• Muscular Pain
• Headache
• Tendinitis
• Bursitis
• Sciatica
• Tennis Elbow

Dry Needling

Dry Needling, or IMS (intramuscular stimulation) involves using acupuncture needles to specifically target injured muscles and soft tissue, which have contracted and become shortened from being overloaded.

These shortened muscles cause pain not only in the affected muscle itself, but also on surrounding tendons and joints. This treatment causes the muscle to “grasp” the needle, forcing the shortened muscle to release, providing relief from pain.

Surgery and other traditional methods cannot treat muscle shortening and painkillers only temporarily mask the pain. IMS provides relief for chronic pain when all other methods of treatment fail. There are no side effects, and the technique is unequalled for finding shortening in deep muscle tissues that has previously gone undiscovered.

Dr. Janet Travell is credited with first using the term “dry needling” when discussing myofascial and connective tissue pain. Drs. Travell and Simon found nearly a 90 percent correlation between common acupuncture points and myofascial trigger points, and also found that dry needle stimulation at the trigger points worked better than injection of pharmaceuticals into the points.

Understanding the Myofascial Pain and Impingement Syndromes

The term myofascial refers to both the muscle and a broad sheet of fascia, or connective tissue under the skin, that includes nerve, blood vessels, binding of tendon and joint capsules, ligamentous tissues and sheaths around bones. The pain syndrome is more than an acute muscle strain. It is usually a chronic syndrome, or an acute syndrome with underlying subclinical problems, that involves sensory, motor and autonomic symptoms caused by tissue lesions, which are trigger points.