Jeff Langmaid compares spinal adjustments, dry needling, and acupuncture for chronic low back pain. Research shows dry needling reduces pain and disability more than the other two, and combining it with other treatments produces larger pain reductions.
According to previous meta analysis of RCTs randomized control trials, spinal adjustments had better effects on chronic low back pain than acupuncture and both had similar on functional improvement. So this is also those differences. And there's a Great blog article Dr. Todd Sullivan helped with this on dry needling versus acupuncture that is on the smart Chiropractor blog. So if you need to parse those out at all, check out the Smart Chiropractor blog. So dry needling was found to be more effective than other treatments in reducing the intensity of low back pain. Really interesting and functional disability. But the significant effects of dry needling in combination with other treatments on pain intensity may be superior to dry needling alone post low back pain intervention. So what does that tell us? That tells us that dry needling also is one of these items that hey, by itself can it provide benefit? Of course it could. That benefit can be amplified when it's utilized with other modalities.
