International Dry Needling

Dr. Jan Dommerholt, PT, DPT, MPS President & CEO, Myopain Seminars (USA) | Co-Founder, IDNETAG Some people teach dry needling. Jan Dommerholt helped build it. For thirty years, Dr. Dommerholt has not simply taught the technique — he has shaped what safe, evidence-based dry needling means worldwide. He taught the first dry needling courses in Spain in 1996 and brought dry needling education to the United States in 1997. But his deeper legacy is this: much of what is now considered standard safe practice in dry needling exists because he researched it, wrote it, and defended it. He made dry needling measurably safer. In 2011, Dr. Dommerholt co-authored the Guidelines for Safe Dry Needling Practice for the Irish Society of Chartered Physiotherapists — among the first national safety guidelines in the world. His organisation, Myopain Seminars, became the first dry needling education company anywhere to collect adverse-event data from its own graduates systematically. The published research that followed found a serious adverse event risk of less than 0.04% — evidence, not assumption, that properly trained clinicians needle safely. He refines techniques based on real-world evidence. Dr. Dommerholt works continuously with university researchers, fellows, and PhD students to quantify and improve the safety of needling. Independent researchers who examined his approaches have validated them anatomically — concluding, for example, that "the technique by Dommerholt" enables a safe needle angle to reach the piriformis muscle. When real-world data reveals a risk, his techniques evolve. What he teaches today is not what he taught in 1996 — and that is precisely the point. He sets the global standard. In 2023, he co-founded the International Dry Needling Education & Training Advisory Group (IDNETAG), uniting physiotherapists, physicians, osteopaths, and acupuncturists across nine countries to develop and publish evidence-based international safety guidelines — work that continues in peer-reviewed journals today. When American state boards debated whether physiotherapists should be permitted to needle at all, he was the expert called to testify; he later served on the American Physical Therapy Association's national Dry Needling Workgroup. He wrote the literature. Four books — translated into multiple languages — nearly 100 textbook chapters, and more than 150 scientific articles. Independent bibliometric analysis ranks him among the two most published dry needling authors in history. With Prof. César Fernández-de-las-Peñas, he co-authored Trigger Point Dry Needling: An Evidence and Clinical-Based Approach (3rd ed., 2026), a reference text in dry needling education worldwide. His clinical roots run to the very origin of the field: his early mentors included Dr. Janet Travell, Dr. David Simons, and Dr. Karel Lewit — the founders of trigger point science. A Dutch-trained physiotherapist with a Doctorate in Physical Therapy (University of St. Augustine) and a Master of Professional Studies (Lynn University), he remains a practicing clinician at Bethesda Physiocare in Maryland, one of only 41 clinics worldwide recognised as an Ehlers-Danlos Society Core Network of Excellence.