Many people joke about how, after a certain age, we can injure ourselves sleeping awkwardly, picking something up off the floor and even sneezing! It would be funny if it weren’t so true!

Add any kind of additional physical pursuits to these everyday “risks” and dump it on top of today’s highly sedentary lifestyle, and you dramatically increase the likelihood of low back pain.

But there’s no reason to live with chronic pain. Many modern chiropractic techniques can be extremely beneficial in offering immediate back pain relief and a huge assist with long-term healing. One such technique that is becoming more widely utilized is dry needling.

Dry needling involves the insertion of tiny filiform needles, similar to those used in acupuncture, into the muscle structures of the body. They are “dry” because nothing is injected. It’s the needles skillfully placed that do all the work.

Unlike acupuncture therapy where needles are inserted into the superficial layers of the skin at precise points along the body’s meridians, dry needling involves a deeper insertion at depths dependent upon the structures being targeted – muscle, cartilage, ligament, or tendon. The goal is to reach the trigger point of pain in an effort to deactivate it.

Trigger points are hyper irritated areas in the muscle structure where a sharp, pinpointed pain can be experienced locally or radially with applied pressure. Trigger points are generally created from a wide variety of possible traumas including acute injury, spinal misalignments, poor posture when sitting or standing, and musculoskeletal degeneration that accompanies aging, among others. They are irritated enough to affect movement and may be palpable as literal knots deep within the muscle tissues. With the patient’s assistance, chiropractors can identify these trigger points and determine where dry needing therapy should be centered to allow the release of these knots and constrictions.

Untying these knots can effectively reduce pain — both immediately and long term — and enhance mobility. It has the greater result of resetting pain pathways in the area so that your neurology doesn’t unnecessarily protect you from a greater range of motion.

Dry needling is a chiropractic therapy with head-to-toe applications — headaches to plantar fasciitis. It is proven effective for addressing chronic back pain, relieving back spasms and inflammation, and freeing up movement by improving blood flow to the area and allowing more complete healing to occur.

Because trigger points in the lower back are often the result of spinal misalignments that have overly strained tendons, ligaments, and muscles in the lower back, they are seen as a symptom of lower back pain rather than the cause. Underlying issues that lead to their formation should always be addressed.

At Whole Body Health, we always seek to identify the root cause of pain, and only then determine which chiropractic modalities to incorporate into a patient’s therapy. Combining spinal manipulation with dry needling therapy is particularly beneficial for relieving low back and elevating overall recovery efforts.

If you suffer from chronic low back pain, contact Whole Body Health today.