My uncle Jacob is changing careers again… or, at least, so he says. I’m skeptical, since he’s always saying this and rarely following through. It was only couple of months ago that he was all about becoming an DJ. I’ve seen virtually zero evidence of that. Then there was the period earlier this year during which he was hell-bent on becoming an online business coach – fat lot of good he’d be at that. He never seems to get beyond giving lip service to his aspirations.

Anyway, he’s now professing to be keen on getting into trigger point dry needling. There are training courses in dry needling in Melbourne, he says, that will qualify him to administer the treatment in just one weekend. I looked up some of the companies that offer the training, and it turned out that Jacob had skipped over a key piece of information (as I’d suspected). Basically, you’re kind of meant to be a practicing physiotherapist (or a medical doctor, osteopath or chiropractor) before you enrol in one of these courses. The closest Jacob has come to being a physio is in his ongoing refinement of his knuckle-cracking technique (i.e. not very close at all).

I  passed on this info to him, and he responded – I kid you not – that he’d just have to sign up for a physio course. I asked if he realised that that would involve spending several years at university, to which he sort of grunted and changed to subject. Then I felt a bit bad for him, so I investigated a bit further to check that there isn’t some kind of ‘dry needling for laymen’ type of course going around. Turns out that it’s kind of the same deal across Australia – dry needling training is for people already practicing in at least some form of manual therapy.

You know, it’s not that he couldn’t do it if he set his mind to it. His only problem is that he gets attached to ideas quickly, and detaches from them just as quickly.