Dry needling involves placing tiny needles into your pain trigger points. These are areas where your muscle tightens, causing pain. Your trigger points can cause tenderness, referred pain and difficulty moving these muscles. Dry needling helps relieve this pain by relaxing these muscles and improving blood flow to these areas. Dry needling is available at some physical therapy clinics OKC, but these are the conditions that it can help.
For Temporomandibular Jaw Pain
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Temporomandibular jaw pain (TMJ) may be the result of genetics, injury, arthritis, jaw clenching or grinding the teeth. This disorder causes severe pain in the joint that connects your jawbone to your skull. You can experience pain in the muscles that connect to these joints.
Dry needling physical therapy can help with TMJ pain because it can target the trigger points causing the pain. The therapist inserts needles into the muscle fibers that clench, causing increased blood flow and relaxation of the muscle. In addition to reducing your pain, this treatment can help you move your jaw better and increase your range of motion. This allows you to restore your jaw function.
Tension and Migraine Headaches
Tension headaches are typically the result of muscle tightness. These headaches can cause pain in your head, neck and scalp. Stress, injuries, anxiety and depression may cause you to tense the muscles in your neck and head, causing pain. However, other causes include alcohol use, physical stress, illnesses, dental issues, eye strain, smoking, fatigue and caffeine.
Migraine headaches tend to have pulsing pain. This pain may be on one side of your head only. You may become nauseated, constipated and sensitive to sound and light. These attacks are typically recurrent and caused by nerve activation within the spinal cord and brain blood vessels.
In both cases, dry needling releases muscle tension and releasing trigger points. This treatment also desensitizes the nerves to promote healing.
Repetitive Motion Injuries
When you move your body the same way all the time, you can experience repetitive motion injuries. These are common in some manual labor jobs where workers perform the same motion all day. For example, carpal tunnel syndrome is a common repetitive motion injury.
Repetitive motions cause specific muscles to tense and not release because your body prepares to complete the motion over and over. However, you may experience severe pain when your muscles do not lengthen and relax. Dry needling therapy targets taught muscles and causes them to relax. It also encourages blood flow, which promotes healing.
Musculoskeletal Conditions
Much of the pain you can experience is musculoskeletal. You may experience pain in your bones, tendons, nerves, muscles and ligaments, and all this chronic or acute pain is musculoskeletal. Even joints can experience musculoskeletal pain.
This type of pain results from poor posture, sprains and strains, bone fractures, joint dislocations, overuse and impact injuries. You may feel burning muscles, fatigue, twitching muscles, aches, stiffness, challenges sleeping and worsening pain when you move. One of the primary treatments for this pain is physical therapy, but massage therapies are common as well. However, dry needling can also help these conditions.
Many conditions that improve through dry needling therapies also benefit from adding normal physical therapy. Therefore, search for a physical therapy clinic that also has dry needling specialists on staff.
