Dry needling is an invasive practice and is thereby outside the physical therapy scope of practice.  

Dry needling by PT's is not safe with the current standards.   Dry needling training is entirely inadequate to protect public safety and consumers. Even the most adept acupuncture students require hundreds and hundreds of hours of acupuncture practice and lecture in order to be able to insert needles safely to the correct depths.  Organs and nerves and arteries lie in the path of too many insertion points to count.  Acupuncturists must develop their palpation and needling sensitivity greatly in order to perform acupuncture safely, and it should be no different wth PTs.  For example, many PT's will try to release the intercostal muscles between the ribs with a needle, and this is incredibly dangerous and places the patient at unnecessary risk of pneumothorax because of the close proximity of the lungs. Even with my thousands and thousands of hours of acupuncture clinical experience, I would never attempt this, because the risk is simply too great for the patient.  

Dry needling is the practice of acupuncture.  There exists a language and cultural barrier that leads to the misunderstanding that these are two different practices, but it is simply that.  Many acupuncturists use foreign words to describe the way we work, but we are still needling into muscles and skin and connective tissue just like PT's to relieve pain.  There is no difference. 

Maegan N. Hodge, L.Ac.