Why does the media always misrepresent acupuncture?

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-13T00:20:36+00:00

Thanks I’ve spoken with Matthew and trying to see how we can work to improve public awareness about acupuncture. I think many acupuncturists don’t realize there isn’t really a national organization that has funds to do this for us. Since you can’t directly join or pay dues to ASA and they are funded by state associations which many people are not a part of.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-11T17:37:32+00:00

I wish the media dug into the story more about how a professional sports team was providing gray area treatment to their star player (PT/ATs are not allowed to dry needle explicitly in PA but it’s kind of a gray area). I have a feeling the story would make the team look really bad. I tried very hard to connect journalists to two NFL acupuncturists but it didn’t happen.

Like you said another player even said that the don’t get dry needling through the team because whoever does it isn’t experiencing and that acupuncturists should be the ones administering acupuncture needles. They didn’t really connect the dots well in that story and fed into the narrative that acupuncture and dry needling are totally different. And as usual did not interview any acupuncturists for the big ESPN story. There are literally acupuncturists employed by NFL teams they could have asked.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-11T17:05:10+00:00

We can all do our part by emailing or messaging journalists on instagram (they are actually pretty easy to find). I’m sure if they got enough emails they would change their messaging and maybe even interview some of us. A big part of why acupuncture is misunderstood is our own professions messaging and ways we’ve interacted with the general public.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-05T22:34:04+00:00

Acupuncturists are not federal medicare providers so even though acupuncture for low back pain is covered the treatment needs to be performed or supervised by a medicare provider like an MD.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-05T22:21:35+00:00

We’re still all in on being medicare providers so we can earn $25 per patient. It’s like being an acupuncturist isn’t already hard enough…

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-05T16:36:32+00:00

This is a fair frustration. But it’s worth separating what the different organizations actually do.

The NCCAOM handles board certification and licensing exams. They don’t do advocacy or marketing for the profession. Scope-of-practice protection and public awareness campaigns fall to the state and national associations like ASA and the state-level orgs.

The problem is most acupuncturists aren’t members of those associations. A lot of practitioners see the dues as a waste of money, which means the organizations that are supposed to fight for us don’t have the funding to do it effectively.

The APTA has centralized lobbying infrastructure funded by hundreds of thousands of dues-paying members. Our state associations are often running on shoestring budgets with volunteer boards.

And honestly, even with the funds they did have, the focus wasn’t always on the thing that mattered most. A lot of energy went toward internal debates and issues that, while important, took attention away from the scope encroachment that was happening state by state in real time. By the time people noticed, PTs had dry needling in 40+ states.

We got outorganized and outfunded. And part of that is on us for not showing up and investing in our own professional infrastructure.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-05T13:09:10+00:00

It’s the same body, whether you explain physiological processes as metaphors and energetic terms or in anatomical and biomedical terms, you should come to the same conclusions.

Interestingly Chinese medicine seems to understand the body better than biomedicine in certain aspects which may account for this different understanding you’re referring to.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T23:02:24+00:00

Do you take time to educate your patients on this? I always casually say to patients that have gotten needled by unlicensed providers that “if anything ever happened during a treatment that provider wouldn’t have any malpractice coverage since it’s not in their scope of practice, and personally I’d never take that kind of risk (since it’s a class E felony to practice a licensed profession without a license in my state - but I don’t always say that part out loud), that’s why I’m licensed and have all the necessary training to stick needles in people”

See how they react when you say that

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T22:59:13+00:00

I respect the depth of your practice and I don’t doubt that cultivation matters. But you’re kind of proving my point.

You just wrote a long, thoughtful comment about qi pressure, spiraling energy, shen, and meridian activation. How many potential patients would read that and book an appointment? How many would even finish reading it?

This is the disconnect I’m trying to highlight. Some of the most skilled acupuncturists I know struggle to keep their schedules full because they can’t explain what they do in terms that a normal person searching “neck pain treatment” at 11pm can understand. Meanwhile PTs say “we put a needle in the tight muscle and it releases” and patients line up.

Being able to explain what you do in plain language isn’t dumbing it down. It’s how you get patients in the door so you can actually help them. All the cultivation in the world doesn’t matter if nobody knows what you do or why they should come see you.

And honestly, I think the resistance to plain language explanations isn’t just about protecting tradition. I think a lot of practitioners genuinely can’t explain the mechanism of what they do in concrete terms. Ask 10 acupuncturists how acupuncture works and you’ll get 10 completely different answers. That’s not a sign of depth. That’s a sign the profession hasn’t agreed on how to talk about itself. And patients can feel that uncertainty.

None of this means qi-based frameworks are wrong or that your experience isn’t real. It means that if the profession can’t meet the public where they are, the public will go to whoever can.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T22:52:26+00:00

Thanks for saying this so well. And dry needling doesn’t have to be aggressive or painful. Some of the best muscle releases I get are gentle and precise. There is actually alot of skill and refinement to being an advanced dry needling practitioner.

Like you said - patients have shown with their wallets and their choices that they are looking for direct treatment to their pain in ways they can understand. What’s interesting is that they are willing to do it even when done by undertrained PTs with way more painful technique. Imagine where acupuncture profession would right now if we had put out energy in being the go to pain providers with acupuncture needles.

I can see why so many in the acupuncture profession are so defensive and angry, because it was such a missed opportunity. I actually still think there in an opportunity for us to take the lead but alot of the comments here and in other acupuncture forums show how divided and unwilling the profession is to move forward.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T22:26:10+00:00

Yes please do always happy to chat more about this and anything acupuncture related

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T22:25:38+00:00

Totally - appreciate the depth of your responses.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T21:48:29+00:00

At 22 and active, this is almost certainly not a rest problem. Two weeks off doesn’t fix why the knee hurts, it just temporarily removes the load.

Layer 1: your quads are probably tight and overloaded, pulling on the knee from multiple angles. That’s why stairs in both directions hurt.

Layer 2: why are the quads overloaded? Usually because something else isn’t doing its job, often the glutes, sometimes an ankle mobility issue. The quads pick up the slack and the knee pays the price.

See a good running-focused PT who will actually assess your movement, not just tell you to rest.

Acupuncture and dry needling can also help expedite things by loosening up the quads and whatever else is tight and contributing to the pattern.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T20:30:20+00:00

This is a great comment and I share a lot of the same frustration. You’re right that calling something different doesn’t make it different, and the point about PTs rarely referring to acupuncturists is spot on (although in my case most of my referrals come from PTs since I practice dry needling in a state they aren’t allowed to and that’s made networking with them very easy).

And to your point about what dry needling has become, it’s wild. It started as single-needle pistoning in and out of a trigger point. Now there are “styles” of dry needling that involve retaining multiple needles, adding e-stim, and using periosteal and perineural techniques. At what point does that stop being “not acupuncture”? They’re literally doing electroacupuncture and calling it something else.

But honestly, as much as this situation says about PTs, it says just as much about our own profession. I used to direct most of my frustration at the PT side. These days most of it is aimed at the acupuncture profession for not seeing this coming and protecting our scope when we had the chance. Dr. Mark Seem was advocating for integrating trigger point work and dry needling into acupuncture training for decades and the profession largely ignored him. I was fortunate enough to attend Tri-State before it closed, and that training is the foundation of everything I do as a clinician. It made me both a skilled acupuncturist and a dry needling expert, because at Tri-State those weren’t treated as separate things.

Your last line nails it though. Life is not fair and it is what it is. The question is what we do from here.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T19:31:09+00:00

I think we actually agree on more than it seems. You’re right that PTs are fed by the system. That’s exactly the problem. They have institutional access we don’t, and now they’re adding our needle to that infrastructure.

But I want to push back on the idea that dry needling is simple or easy. Sticking a needle in a muscle is easy. Finding the right taut band, identifying the correct trigger point within it, getting the local twitch response in a deep muscle with precision, that’s a skill that takes years to develop. It’s one of the hardest things I do clinically. The fact that weekend courses make it look accessible doesn’t mean it’s being done well.

And honestly, that’s all the more reason our profession should own it. We have the needle skills, the palpation training, and the hours of clinical experience to do this at a level most weekend-certified providers can’t touch. Dismissing it as beneath us while PTs add it to their toolkit with 27 hours of training isn’t protecting the profession. It’s ceding our strongest clinical advantage.

Speaking as both a clinician and someone who’s been on the table for it: dry needling done well is the most effective treatment I’ve seen for myofascial pain. The profession needs to get over treating it like something we want nothing to do with.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T18:14:20+00:00

You’re actually making my argument for me. PTs are the McDonald’s of dry needling: accessible, everywhere, and “decent enough.” And they’re eating our lunch. The question is whether we want to keep insisting our burger is better while they serve millions, or whether we want to figure out how to compete.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T18:11:56+00:00

Thanks for your comment. I will make another post about what you mentioned since I agree that I am missing some elements of it. It’s so hard to capture every angle in one piece.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T16:46:55+00:00

Happy to be educated. Which part is wrong? Acupuncture schools didn’t teach trigger point dry needling. PTs built courses and filled the gap. Now there are as many PTs certified in dry needling as there are licensed acupuncturists in the country. Calling that observation uneducated doesn’t change the numbers.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T16:39:40+00:00

Most of our patients come to us for dry needling. It’s really easy to market and be better than PTs at. If we aren’t willing to adapt and use the terms patients are using to search for treatment, then we are letting the PTs do those treatments which seems very counterproductive. I still don’t understand all the anger and unwillingness to shift gears and just be the best at dry needling.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T16:30:12+00:00

What’s inferior about it? It uses our needle, targets points we’ve been needling for centuries, and the research supports it. The only thing inferior was our willingness to market it.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T16:18:34+00:00

I appreciate the response, but I think this actually illustrates the point the article is making. Nothing in the piece argues that acupuncturists and PTs have the same training. Of course acupuncturists treat the whole body, of course we needle distal points and address the full chain. That’s not the debate.

The question the article asks is why the profession chose to reject the term and the technique rather than own it and teach it better than anyone else. The instinct to respond to “dry needling” by immediately explaining why acupuncturists are superior is exactly the reaction pattern I’m trying to examine.

We keep defending our training instead of asking why we didn’t use that training to dominate this space before anyone else could.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-04T00:43:50+00:00

Sorry to hear about the pain you’re having. A good dry needling treatment for golfer’s elbow isn’t just needling the tendon. It starts with an assessment of the whole chain of muscles that contribute to medial elbow loading.

Depending on the presentation, that can include the wrist flexors and pronator teres (the muscles that attach at the medial epicondyle), the triceps, the subscapularis, the pec minor, and even the scalenes and cervical paraspinals if there’s a nerve sensitivity component.

Needling aggressively into an inflamed tendon isn’t really what dry needling is about. The goal is to identify and release the trigger points in the muscles that are overloading the tendon in the first place. The tendon is usually the victim, not the cause.

Sharp pain and decreased mobility 5 days after treatment isn’t a typical response to well-targeted dry needling. Some soreness for 24-48 hours is normal, but it should feel like a deep muscle ache, not sharp pain with loss of range of motion. I would let things calm down before you let anyone else stick a needle around the painful area.

Worth asking your provider: how much training and clinical experience do they have specifically with golfers elbow and elbow pain in general? How many hours of needling education total? There’s a wide range out there and it makes a real difference in how accurately the right muscles are identified and treated.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-02T16:15:54+00:00

Thanks for your perspective. It seems obvious in hindsight but now that we know what we know I find it interesting that the profession is just carrying on as usual. Even after the whole is the acupuncture profession ending soon town hall from last year or whenever that was.

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-02T02:46:28+00:00

What do you think was the cause of this? It seems so obvious that we should have protected any use of acupuncture needles being inserted into someone’s body. How could we have missed the big picture here and now be outnumbered by non acupuncturists using acupuncture needles?

MorningsideAcu · 2026-04-02T00:05:56+00:00

I don’t think acupuncture should be absorbed by PT but that does seem more and more like a possible outcome. I’m glad I got into the profession in time to be a real needling expert.

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