The question about other professionals besides Practitioners of Chinese Medicine/Licensed Acupuncturists performing acupuncture aka dry needling

Dry needling is all the rage now.  PTs all over the place are doing it.  The problem: it's acupuncture.  It's acupuncture without the traditional 4 years of training and national board exams that generally precede national and state acupuncture licensure that then allow licensed practitioners the privilege of needling people.  In other words, the training that allows us to practice Chinese Medicine's most well therapy called acupuncture.  Have I heard people say that dry needling worked for them?  Yes.  .... but did they try acupuncture/ashi needling/trigger point acupuncture/aka dry needling with an acupuncturist first?  Frankly, I believe that it would have worked.  And, it might have worked better because any acupuncturist worth seeing would address the entire body's energetic system, not just the trigger points.  Healing is based upon treating the entire body.  Have I seen cases where dry needling didn't work and in fact (in my professional opinion) undid the energetic work that I was doing with people?  Yes.

I guess the proper thing to do is to ask every person who is placing needles into your body about his/her training.  Thirty eight, fifty eight hours of training?  Learned in a weekend course or even two weekends? Not enough.

Obviously I have a strong opinion about this thing called dry needling and so do our professional watchdog organizations.  Here is the AAAOM's (American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine) position on it.  They call it Intramuscular Manual Therapy --- yet another label for what IS acupuncture (and they give you other labels too).
http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.aaaomonline.org/resource/resmgr/governance/aaaom-tpdn-position_stmt-031.pdf

Got good health?  If not, call me, 303-947-6224 or email DrMLucas@AcupunctureWoman.com.

Even if you have good health, why not maintain it? That's what TCM is all about.  I get acupuncture every other week whether I need it or not …. 

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