Aug 05, 2021
This is such a common question I receive that its worth addressing for everyone. There is no one right answer to this question. It largely depends on you, your body, your pain and how long you have been having the pain for.
Dry Needling and Cupping are great tools to treat myofascial pain. This means pain that is caused from tightness by your muscles (myo) or your connective tissue called fascia (fascial).
Both techniques are intended to target a specific area by bringing blood flow to the tissue. One (dry needling) is done by puncturing the skin with a acupuncture needle to target tight fiber and nerve bundles within your muscles. The other (cupping) is done by distracting the muscle away from the fascia and joints.
When we come to asking will it help you specifically, we need to look much deeper at why exactly you are having the pain in the first place. These tools can be a great way to supplement a program, but if we’re not careful they can also turn into bandaids treatments.
Some common reasons you might be having pain include:
1) Postural- if we needle you but then you go back to sitting with bad posture, the pain will most likely come back on
2) Faulty Repetitive Movement- If you do a movement wrong one time, it might be fine, do it wrong 25, 50, 100+ times and you will start to develop pain points in your body. Before we needle anything we need to take care of your movement patterns
3) Imbalanced Muscles- For example if your hips are weak and not helping to keep the knees in alignment and you have chronic knee pain, well needling won’t get us very far to manage this pain. We need to start at your hips
Among many other reasons including ramping up programming too soon or without the right components, other structural pathology, poor recovery, vitamin deficiencies etc
