Dry Needling

At PRIME PT & Wellness, we’re dedicated to offering specific modalities that can help our patients heal and thrive. We’re proud to offer dry needling, a focused therapy designed to improve wellness and help patients just like you recover from injury.

What is Dry Needling?

Dr. Cristine Drake is certified in dry needling, which is an effective tool to reduce muscle spasms, trigger points, and resolve chronic pain cycles. This therapy can be used with electrotherapy or without depending on the condition. Our team has had success with resolving/reducing chronic plantar fasciitis, hip pain, back and neck pain in addition to other chronic conditions.

Acute pain associated with muscle spasms can also be beneficial with dry needling to resolve muscle spasms, especially when electrotherapy is included, which can enable a person to get out of pain and back to their normal activities.

Differences Between Acupuncture and Dry Needling

While dry needling and acupuncture both use monofilament needles without medication for therapeutic purposes, dry needling does not attempt to move energy or “qi,” nor does it rely on diagnoses based on traditional Chinese medicine. Dry needling is used by physicians, physical therapists, chiropractors, and osteopaths to treat muscles, ligaments, tendons, subcutaneous fascia, scar tissue, peripheral nerves, and neurovascular bundles associated with a number of neuromusculoskeletal conditions.

What Conditions Can it Help?

This focused therapy can help take people out of the pain cycle and restore normal neuromuscular pathways.

Patients may find improvements in chronic conditions (>3 months) such as neck and back pain, chronic tension headaches, TMJ, plantar fasciitis, hip pain, ITB Syndrome, and shoulder pain. In addition, post-surgical scars can be reduced and helped by a form of needling in which a herringbone technique of needles are placed with unidirectional winding and “tenting” which helps stretch fascia surrounding the surgical site