I have a cousin, Sara, who suffered lower back pain for the most of her life. The story of how my uncle Lonnie changed his career to undertake a course professional dry needling so he could help her is one of the best ‘dad to the rescue’ stories I’ve heard yet. I remember even as kids, she’d often be in pain and though we just accepted it as normal – but not Lonnie. He was actually a practising physio, and through the recommendation of a friend, had a lot of success treating his own knee injury through a dry needling practitioner he met in 2009.
In the end, it was this injury that led to him looking up dry needling courses. New Zealand is fairly fast moving when it comes to acknowledging new and alternative treatments, so when he decided to divert his physiotherapy background to one in dry needling, it didn’t take him long to find a course he loved.
His decision actually came Christmas in 2012, when all us kids were playing in the front yard and her back seized up and started spasming. She was clearly in a lot of pain and needed relief, and there was only so much they could do. I remember the look on her Dad’s face as he cooled her forehead and tried to take her mind off the pain. They came to our house on New Year’s day for a regular family gathering and in the space of that week, he had enrolled in a dry needling course for the following year.
Flash forward to a few years later, and Lonnie is now a fully qualified dry needling practitioner, who can now treat Sara’s pain in a way that actually works. And the difference it has made for Sara is unbelievable- she wants to follow in her dad’s footsteps and study it herself, which I guess is probably the best testimonial for dry needling imaginable.