A critical overview of the current myofascial pain literature – January 2017

Due to a change in the production schedule of this journal, two issues of this article were due within a month of each other, which precluded the usual group of authors from contributing to the current paper, but they will participate in this review in the next issue. This overview includes several articles questioning the use of dry needling (DN) by non-acupuncturists, which continues to be a controversial topic especially in the United States. Several researchers examined the effects of manual trigger point (TrP) techniques applied to TrPs in the upper trapezius muscle. The results were mixed and not necessarily consistent among studies. The research of the clinical management of TrPs is still limited, because of small sample sizes, insufficient power, the inherent risk of the introduction of bias, and poor study methodologies.