I’ve grown up with intense back pain almost my whole life, so I know how debilitating it can be. As a physiotherapist, my father did everything he could to alleviate my pain and help give me full mobility. That’s why, when my Dad took on a course in Christchurch for dry needling it changed our lives drastically.
The bike accident happened when I was 12. I was clipped by a car and landed hard on the kerbside. The damage to my lower back was serious and I had to learn to live with spasming and pain. For an eight year old, I’m not sure if knowing only a little about pain was a good or a bad thing.
Anyway, one Christmas, our family were playing in the sprinklers out the front of my grandma’s house, when I slipped on the grass and my back went into a spasm. It was the worst pain I’d had yet and this was the catalyst for my Dad to find something that would actually help me.
We went home that night and Dad started looking for courses in New Zealand for trigger point needling. Dad was a footy player whose career was ended by a bad tackle and he went from a career as a professional player into a career in physiotherapy.
One of his colleagues, Marie, had been having incredible success treating her patients on a non-invasive level from dry needling, and she had treated Dad with amazing results.Dad had Marie do an after hours treatment for me, and I was immediately relieved. No painkillers.
So, Dad decided to go back to study so he could treat me with dry needling in the same way. In what seemed like no time at all, Dad suddenly had a whole new world of working opportunity come to him.
So I’m in year twelve now and I’m hunkering down so exams go well. I’m planning on following Dad into a similar line of work, and I hope to get into osteopathy, applying trigger point dry needling in the same way. If i worked for me, I can only imagine who else it might work for.