Dry Needling, Cupping & Other Therapies

We use multiple techniques to break up scar tissue, loosen tight muscles, improve circulation, and decrease pain.

Dry Needling

Dry needling is a modern technique that uses needles to ease muscular pain. Practitioners place the needles in “trigger points”, knotted or hard spots in your muscle or tissue. Dry needling creates intramuscular stimulation, which releases the knots and relieves spasm and pain. Physical therapists who perform dry needling are rarely highly trained in the procedure. A board-certified acupuncturist is far more qualified to treat you.

Cupping Therapy

A therapeutic cupping treatment involves placing glass cups on the skin. By warming the air within the cup, a vacuum is created, and when it is applied to the skin, the tissue is drawn up into the cup. The suction and negative pressure provided by cupping can loosen muscles, encourage blood flow, and sedate the nervous system. Cupping is used to relieve back and neck pains, stiff muscles, anxiety, fatigue, migraines, rheumatism, and other conditions.

Attention: Cupping will produce bruising.

Other Therapies

These common modalities may be incorporated into your acupuncture session to intensify your treatment:

• Tui Na, also called Chinese Medical Massage, is a therapeutic manual therapy massage technique.
• Gua sha is the practice of using a special tool to apply pressure and scrape the skin to relieve pain and tension and to reduce inflammation. Gua sha causes bruising, or microtrauma, which causes a response in the body to break up scar tissue. Also called the Grafton Technique.
• E-stim, or electrical stimulation, sends mild electrical pulses through the skin to help stimulate injured muscles or manipulate nerves to reduce pain. Pulses aimed at the nervous system block the transmission of pain signals from reaching the spinal cord and brain. The pulses also stimulate the body to produce more natural pain-relieving chemicals called endorphins.
• Electroacupuncture is a combination of E-stim with acupuncture. As with traditional acupuncture, needles are inserted on specific points along the body. The needles are then attached by small clips to the e-stim device. Electroacupuncture uses two needles at time so that the impulses can pass from one needle to the other. Several pairs of needles can be stimulated simultaneously, usually for no more than 30 minutes at a time.
• TDP Mineral Heat Therapy : The TDP lamp is a specific electromagnetic lamp that produces far infrared (below visible light) emissions. It contains a heated mineral plate made of a proprietary formula of 33 trace elements, which stimulates your body to heal naturally.
• Auricular therapy is acupuncture of the ear. Small tacks or needles are placed in the outer surface of the ear. It is used mostly in the treatment of both acute and chronic pain, anxiety related disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, obesity, smoking cessation, alcohol withdrawal and other types of substance abuse disease.