The new Illinois Acupuncture practice act has greatly expanded our scope of practice and will help our professional growth in Illinois.

It also includes the fact that we must find a comprise with physical therapists on ‘dry needling’.

Below I have an excerpt from the Illinois Acupuncture Association with further details on our new practice act and the status of  ‘dry needling’ in Illinois.

“The new act that has just passed brings vast expansion to the scope of practice, including herbal medicine, Chinese dietary therapy, laser therapy, “other methods”, dietary supplements, “manual methods”, “exercise”, “evaluation or treatment in accordance with traditional and modern practices of East Asian medical theory.

And other provisions which our amazing Practice Act Revision Chair Lindy Camardella will enumerate in a separate document.

The new Act truly brings the profession into the current day, and allows it to grow without the need for further revisions to the Act itself.

However…

In opening our Act, the physical therapists utilized the opportunity to seek expansion of their scope to include dry needling.  While we successfully kept their language out of our Act, IDFPR itself made it unequivocally clear that if we did not come to some compromise with the physical therapists, the Department would oppose our new practice act, assuring its failure.  (Legislation that governs professional regulation will never pass if the regulatory department opposes it.)

We were informed that we must negotiate some type of legislation to expand PT scope in parallel with our act, or our Act would fail.

Here is a link to the full paper on the status of ‘Dry Needling’ in Illinois, from ILAAOM.