It all started with a very horrible lumbago

We have a small farm and I run a saw mill. It was 1973 and I was just 35 years old when something happened in the saw mill which would change my life forever. I lifted a tree trunk awkwardly and suddenly felt a strange light tear in my lower back. After that i couldn't stand up straight. I just managed to drag myself to the nearest sofa and I assumed that the problem would go away in the next fifteen minutes or so. However, that wasn't the case.

I coudn't get up from the sofa and had to try and slowly lower myself onto the floor. It took me a quarter of an hour to get up, millimetre by millimetre. "What now?" I asked myself, "Do I go to a doctor? To someone who can push it back into place? or somewhere else?".


The healer

I didn't go to a doctor back then. That's why I can't say if a doctor could have helped me or not. Perhaps I would have had my intervertebral cartilage operated on. It was also important to me to save time. I had to think of a man who I had laughed at 20 years before. I had laughed at him because I just wasn't aware of back problems and the pain they brought with them. I was driven to this Josef Müller in our village. With one gesture he told me "People come in bent over and walk out again standing straight." Indeed: I had to swing one leg while he pressed my spine with his thumbs from behind - and the pain was gone. It was over so quickly. Josef Müller had watched an elderly farmer's wife apply this method long before. She was a small simple lady who came to his stable to set a cow and who had also treated the servant. Josef Müller had been treating people from the village since my youth, perhaps one or two people a month.

As the treatment drew to an end, I asked him if it was possible to learn this method. He answered, "You don't need to learn it, you can already do it." I was astonished and was somehow inspired by the whole thing. Later I brought him a bottle of wine to thank him but unfortunately we weren't able to have much more contact than that as Josef Müller was a very sick man. Four weeks later he was in a coma and died eight weeks after that. So I had to learn this method alone.

My wife's headaches

My wife had suffered from headaches for fifteen years back then. She had exhausted almost every form of treatment. A professor from Ravensburg had discovered from an X-ray that two of her transverse processes of the vertrebra were much too long. "These were putting pressure on a nerve - we would have to saw them off" as the doctors put it. I now believe that the vertrebra was just distorted and that what was seen on the X-ray was just an optical illusion. After listening to this diagnosis we felt we had nothing to lose and I said to my wife "Let's do it just like the old man did to me". No sooner had i spoken and it was done. I touched the two vertebral processes with my fingers and carefully pushed them back into place so that they were equal. It worked. Her headaches never returned.

I asked, "Can I take a look?". "Yes, of course". I was just interested to see what could be wrong. After successfully treating my wife I wanted to see if I could perhaps be of some help here too. To my amazement, I noticed that one of her legs was five centimetres longer than the other. That can't be normal I thought. It has to have something to do with the pain. Our neighbour then told us that she had been going to a doctor for a year for that very reason. She had been prescribed injections and radiation treatment which had not helped at all.

According to my judgement, the painful leg had somehow been pulled out of the hip joint. However, noone had ever showed me how to put a hip back into place. I thought to myself, if a hip can come out then it must be able to go back in again and I went about it instinctively. I pulled up her leg and, in one movement, pushed it back into the hip in a way that the leg would also move under normal circumstances. After this, both legs were the same length again. Two hours later, the lady called out of the window that she could walk again, that the pain was gone and that i should take another look tomorrow.

Our neighbour walked the one kilometre to church on the other side of the mountain everyday until she reached a good old age.

The limping farmer.

My next case was a farmer with a limp who had never known anything different. It was obvious that one leg was longer than the other. Just like with our neighbour, I was able to put his leg back into place. Three weeks later I found out that the same farmer had fallen seven metres from some scaffolding. I was sure that his hip joint had been dislocated again from the fall. However, it hadn't. As he came to my saw mill as a customer three months later, he showed me a forty centimetre long scar on his leg - the result of the wound on his leg from the fall. The scar was on the same leg I had treated - however the joint had remained unscathed from the accident. That was very important information for me: the joint wasn't worn out, otherwise it would have been out of place again. Realising that such joint problems were not so much to do with wear and tear but were really out of place gave me courage to continue with my work.

I soon discovered that people with joint problems could also help themselves. I tried it out, along with my patients to see if it was possible for the inflicted person to put his own leg back into place. And I succeeded in my attempts. That was yet another step in the right direction. The patient could then treat himself afterwards by doing certain exercises without depending on me.

Unexpected side-effects

And then my spine patients began saying things to me later like, "The pains in my heart have disappreared", or "I can see better", or, "My digestion has got alot better", or, "Since receiving treatment, my son hasn't wet the bed anymore". I then became curious. If that was really the case then these things had something to do with the spine.

However, how did he know that the root of the problem lay in the seventh cervical vertebra?

I could find many examples for the connection between vertebre and organs. This was how I once treated a nun who had a paralysed tongue. Her doctor called me. I pushed the second cervical vertebra into position and at the same time the paralysis disappeared and everything was fine again.

Then I had a particularly problematic case: a woman was brought to me by her partner. She was five months pregnant , her circulation was very poor, one could hardly feel her pulse and she seemed to be very drowsy. I wanted to send her straight to hospital. But she told me she had just come from there. She had been given an injection and told to go home. I touched her digestive nerves, pushed the vertebre back into position and was hardly finished when the lady felt the need to be sick. She was already feeling much better on the way home. The couple returned two days later - grinning from ear to ear. The following had happened: the lady's stomach had stopped working because the nerves in the vertebre responsible for the stomach had been trapped. The stomach had continued to take in food and had inflated but couldn't stretch properly as the unborn baby was taking up too much space. That as the reason why the stomach was putting pressure on the lungs and heart. The heart could no longer beat properly and that was why she had had problems with her circulation.

Dr Hanson's acquaintance.

Dr. Thomas Hansen, former surgeon and orthopaedic specialist in Bremen came to me. He was looking for a complete method of healing - just treating the body was not enough for him anymore. After giving up his surgery and opening a healing centre in Marktrettenbach, between Memmingen and Kaufbeuren, he heard people in the village say "If you have something wrong with your back, you have to go to a Dorn specialist, but a Dorn specialist is not a doctor." He was so amazed by this that he wanted to find out who I was. Both Dr Hansen and his wife had problems with their backs and came to me for treatment.

After this Dr. Hansen came up with the idea of giving seminars on my method. He gave me boxes and boxes of medical literature with the words, "But Mr Dorn, you need to have some kind of foundation, you can't just stand there and talk." That was what I had also thought, by just pressing my patients' vertebre. First of all Dr. Hansen explained one thing to me. It was the Dorn processes which I moved, and it was with this movement, that the vertebre moved. I had just been doing it how I thought and it had worked anyway!

I then had my first attempt at a seminar. And it wasn't the last. I had thought that giving seminars was a talent and wasn't something that one could learn. To my surprise I found out that it wasn't only down to talent.

At every seminar there were a number of people who understood my method intuitively. The word got around and more and more people were becoming convinced.

The method made a name for itself.

Non-medical practitioner and event organiser Helmuth Koch had also heard about the seminars in the meantime and had been present. He too was convinced by this method. In 1988 he asked me "Would you put your name to this method?" I answered him that I could actually use my name as the treatment was developed by me. Josef Müller had treated me back then but just my spine. He didn't know how to put legs back into place and so I guess he also hadn't worked with the cervical vertebre.

So the method was named Methode Dorn by Helmuth Koch and I had a good conscience. However, it is not important to me what it is called or who invented it, but that it worked and helped alot of people. In the meantime lots of people were making the effort to spread the word through the seminars. The Dorn Method, once just a small regional thing is no national thing anymore - it has become an internationally recognised method of treatment.