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Needles in your body. Weird, right? A few years ago, dry needling seemed like an alien fable. Yet today, half of physical therapists use it! Is dry needling a success story? And how does it work?

During dry needling therapy, the physical therapist touches the trigger points of a tense muscle with a very thin needle, which provokes certain signals. When your therapist pushes on these painful trigger points for a long time, the muscle tries to relax in response. Unlike normal therapy, invasive work is done on the muscles and not just superficially on the skin.

Bye-bye, tension and pain

Compared to standard therapy, where manual treatment of your trigger points has to be repeated, dry needling has results after just one treatment. Great, right? With dry needling, you can expect a better response from tense muscles. First, your muscle will be stiff for 24 to 48 hours because damage has been done to it. Afterward, you'll experience a huge decrease in tension and pain.

So, dry needling removes tension? Eureka! Yes, but there is a root cause of this tension. You can certainly go into a dry needling treatment in the short term. But after that, you still need to work on the cause of your pain through exercise therapy or postural corrections, for example. Why? Because dry needling as a treatment strategy should not be applied more than twice in a row. The needles always cause minimal damage to the muscles. They are not dangerous, just don't overuse them. Or it's bye-bye muscles instead of bye-bye pain. And we don't want that!

Our verdict? Dry needling is undoubtedly a great added value within the world of physical therapy. However, physiotherapists and patients should beware of using it too much. And if you respect that, dry needling remains a miracle cure.