The Man Behind SOT: Dr. M.B. DeJarnette and the Story That Changed Chiropractic Forever

There is a pattern I have noticed in the history of medicine: the most profound advances tend to come from people who were first patients themselves.

Dr. Major Bertrand DeJarnette was in his early twenties when an industrial accident nearly killed him. The injuries were severe enough that the prognosis was grim — he was told he might never walk again. He survived. He sought healing. And in the process of being restored, he encountered chiropractic and osteopathy and made a decision that would shape the next seven decades of his life.

He became both.

A chiropractor and an osteopath. A clinician and a researcher. A man so driven by the question of how the body heals that he continued refining his work until he was in his 90s, leaving behind a system so comprehensive that the profession is still unpacking its full clinical implications today.

I think about DeJarnette often, because his story echoes mine in a way I find meaningful. I had torticollis as a child. The medical recommendation was pharmaceutical. My parents took me to a chiropractor instead, and that single experience changed the direction of my life. I became a chiropractor. I found SOT. I have spent 23 years going deeper into this work. The parallel to DeJarnette is imperfect, but it is real: a personal healing experience becoming a life's work.

Who Was Dr. Major Bertrand DeJarnette?

Dr. M.B. DeJarnette was born in 1899 in Moundsville, West Virginia. He was a singular figure in the history of healthcare — not because he followed the path others laid, but because he refused to. At a time when chiropractic and osteopathy were seen as competing and mutually exclusive systems, DeJarnette pursued mastery of both, earning degrees in each discipline.

The industrial accident he suffered as a young man was his entry point into this world. The injuries he sustained, and the healing process he went through, convinced him that the body possessed a far greater capacity for self-correction than conventional medicine credited — and that the job of the practitioner was to identify and remove the obstacles to that self-correction, not simply to manage symptoms.

He practiced in Nebraska for most of his career, in a small office that became a pilgrimage destination for chiropractors from around the world who came to watch him work and learn from him directly. He died in 1992 at the age of 92, still clinically active. By the time he was done, he had spent more than 60 years developing, testing, refining, and publishing the system he called Sacro Occipital Technique — a name that captures the central structural relationship he identified as the master key to the human nervous system: the sacrum and the occiput, connected by the dural tube that houses the spinal cord.

The Birth of SOT — 1920s Through 1950s

DeJarnette began developing the foundations of SOT in the early 1920s. The early work focused on the pelvis.

He had noticed — through painstaking observation of thousands of patients — that specific patterns of pelvic dysfunction produced predictable patterns of symptoms throughout the rest of the body. The pelvis was not just a structural base; it was a neurological command post. When it was imbalanced, the effects cascaded upward through every spinal segment, through the dural tube, and ultimately into the cranium.

The DeJarnette Bulletins began in 1925 — a remarkable series of clinical and research monographs that DeJarnette published and distributed to practitioners. From 1925 through 1985, he wrote and distributed these bulletins continuously, sharing clinical observations, anatomical analysis, case studies, and technique refinements. They are a primary source document for the development of SOT and a window into the mind of a man who thought about human health with extraordinary rigor and creativity.

The Category system — the clinical classification framework that organizes pelvic and spinal dysfunction into three distinct patterns (Category I, II, and III) — emerged from these decades of observation. DeJarnette was not theorizing from anatomy textbooks. He was watching patterns emerge from the examination of real patients, tracking outcomes over time, and systematically refining his understanding of what drove those patterns. The Categories are an empirical framework — built from data, not dogma.

In the 1940s and 1950s, DeJarnette encountered and incorporated the cranial work of Dr. William Garner Sutherland, the osteopathic physician who had demonstrated that the bones of the skull are not fused in adults but continue to move in a subtle rhythmic pattern driven by cerebrospinal fluid production and reabsorption. Sutherland's work was controversial within osteopathy. DeJarnette recognized its clinical significance immediately and developed specific chiropractic techniques for restoring normal cranial mobility — a branch of SOT he called Craniopathy.

The Discoveries That Set SOT Apart

DeJarnette's commitment to whole-body analysis produced a clinical language that had never existed before in chiropractic.

The arm fossa test and occipital fiber analysis gave practitioners reproducible indicators for identifying which Category pattern was present — removing guesswork from the initial examination. Leg length analysis in specific positions provided indicators of dural and sacral involvement. These were not vague impressions; they were consistent, repeatable clinical signs that different practitioners examining the same patient would identify in the same way.

The cranial rhythmic impulse — the subtle, rhythmic motion of the cranial bones that Sutherland had identified — became a diagnostic and treatment tool within SOT. DeJarnette developed techniques that could be taught, learned, and reproduced with consistent results, unlike some of the more intuitive cranial approaches that had preceded his work.

What unified all of it was the dural tube. DeJarnette recognized that the dura mater — the tough connective tissue sheath surrounding the spinal cord, attaching at both the sacrum below and the occiput above — was the structural link connecting every piece of the puzzle. Pelvic patterns affected the dura. Dural tension affected the cranium. Cranial restriction looped back to affect the sacrum. The system was circular, not linear, and it required a circular understanding to treat effectively.

Most importantly: DeJarnette tested everything on himself first. There are accounts, well-known within the SOT community, of techniques he developed, refined, and validated through self-experimentation before ever applying them to patients. This is the mark of a genuine researcher — not someone selling a method, but someone genuinely trying to understand.

CMRT — The Branch Nobody Expected

CMRT — Chiropractic Manipulative Reflex Technique — was perhaps DeJarnette's most unexpected contribution, and in some ways his most profound.

As he accumulated clinical experience over the decades, DeJarnette observed that some vertebral subluxations could not be permanently corrected through spinal manipulation alone. They kept returning to the same pattern, no matter how many times or how skillfully they were adjusted. Something was driving them back.

He began investigating the relationship between specific vertebral levels and specific organs. What he found was a bidirectional reflex system: organs under stress send signals through the autonomic nervous system to the spinal segments that supply them, creating and maintaining subluxations at predictable levels. Correct the vertebra without quieting the organ signal, and the vertebra returns to its dysfunctional position.

DeJarnette incorporated Chapman's neurolymphatic reflex points — specific skin and fascial points that correspond to organ function, mapped by osteopath Frank Chapman in the 1930s — and combined them with direct visceral manual techniques and spinal correction into a systematic protocol for organ-vertebral dysfunction. CMRT made it possible to address the liver through its spinal reflex, the stomach through its spinal reflex, the reproductive organs, the kidneys, the intestines — all within a chiropractic framework.

This was not "treating diseases." It was identifying and correcting the neurological interference pattern that connected organ dysfunction to spinal dysfunction, and allowing the body's own regulatory mechanisms to restore normal function. The distinction matters clinically. CMRT doesn't replace medical care for organ disease — it addresses the neurological component of organ-vertebral relationships that medicine typically does not evaluate.

Only practitioners with Advanced SOT certification through SORSI are trained in the full scope of CMRT. It requires years of postgraduate study and demonstrated clinical competency.

The Research Legacy

The DeJarnette Bulletins, published from 1925 through 1985, represent one of the most sustained bodies of clinical documentation in chiropractic history. They are not peer-reviewed papers in the modern sense, but they are systematic, detailed, and internally consistent — a 60-year record of a careful mind working through a complex problem.

Beyond DeJarnette's own writing, SOT has attracted formal research attention. Dr. Tedd Koren conducted controlled studies documenting that SOT pelvic block procedures produce measurable changes in brainwave activity — specifically, significant increases in alpha wave patterns indicative of parasympathetic nervous system activation. The blocks are not merely repositioning bones; they are creating a measurable neurological event.

SORSI — the Sacro Occipital Research Society International — was founded to carry DeJarnette's research tradition forward. SOTO-USA (Sacro Occipital Technique Organization) continues to support education, research, and the preservation of DeJarnette's original work. The Advanced certification available through SORSI represents a direct lineage from DeJarnette's own standards — a documented commitment to the full scope of the technique, not just its introductory elements.

Why This Lineage Matters for You as a Patient

When you come to a practitioner certified at the Advanced level through SORSI, you are connecting to a century of development.

SOT did not emerge from a weekend seminar or a marketing insight. It emerged from 60 years of one man's relentless clinical inquiry, refined through the work of hundreds of certified practitioners over the decades since his death, and organized into a teachable, reproducible system with documented clinical outcomes.

The difference between a practitioner who has attended an introductory SOT course and one who has achieved Advanced certification is significant. Basic SOT training covers the pelvic blocks and the Category system — powerful tools in themselves. Advanced certification means mastery of the full scope: Category I, II, and III work, SOT Craniopathy, and CMRT organ techniques. These are not optional extras. They are the elements that make SOT a complete whole-body system rather than a technique for low back pain.

I am the only Advanced SOT-certified chiropractor in San Antonio. I pursued this level of training because when I discovered SOT at Western States Chiropractic College, it was the first system I had encountered that seemed equal to the complexity of what the human body actually is. Most systems excel at a piece of the problem. SOT — fully applied — addresses the structural foundation, the neurological system, the cranial mechanism, and the organ reflexes as one integrated whole.

Dan's Personal Connection to the DeJarnette Philosophy

DeJarnette's story begins with an injury severe enough to threaten his mobility. Chiropractic — and the belief that the body knows how to heal if given the right conditions — restored him. He spent the rest of his life trying to understand, as precisely as possible, what those right conditions were.

My story begins with torticollis — a child's head locked in a twisted position, a prescription offered, and parents who made a different choice. One chiropractic visit. One correction. A different trajectory.

I enrolled at Western States Chiropractic College because I wanted to understand what had happened to me as a child, and how to create that kind of result reliably for other people. When I found SOT, I found a system rigorous enough to provide real answers. I pursued Advanced SORSI certification because the introductory level wasn't enough. I have spent 23 years in clinical practice because the work continues to reveal new dimensions — in patients, in the technique, in my own understanding.

SOT, as DeJarnette designed it, is not a technique. It is a philosophy: that the body is a complete, integrated system; that symptoms are the body's way of communicating where the system has broken down; and that the practitioner's job is to identify the deepest root of that breakdown and create the conditions for healing — not to manage the symptom while leaving the cause untouched.

That is the philosophy I practice every day at Pura Vida Chiropractic. I am grateful to the man who spent 60 years building the map.

Key Takeaways

• Dr. M.B. DeJarnette (1899–1992) was both a chiropractor and an osteopath who spent 60 years developing Sacro Occipital Technique, beginning after a near-fatal industrial accident that chiropractic helped heal.
• SOT's Category system emerged from decades of systematic clinical observation — an empirical framework for classifying pelvic and spinal dysfunction patterns.
• DeJarnette incorporated Sutherland's cranial work into SOT (Craniopathy) and developed CMRT to address organ-vertebral reflex relationships — two branches that extended SOT far beyond conventional chiropractic scope.
• The DeJarnette Bulletins (1925–1985) are among the most sustained records of clinical documentation in chiropractic history.
• Research has confirmed that SOT pelvic block procedures produce measurable neurological changes (alpha wave increases) in controlled studies.
• SORSI Advanced certification represents a direct lineage from DeJarnette's clinical standards. Dr. Dan Foss holds this certification and is the only Advanced SOT-certified chiropractor in San Antonio.
• Like DeJarnette, Dr. Foss was first a patient — his childhood experience with chiropractic is the foundation of a 23-year commitment to this work.

If you would like to experience what 100 years of whole-body chiropractic development looks like in clinical practice, we would be honored to have you at Pura Vida. Call (210) 685-1994 or visit us at 2318 NW Military Hwy #103, San Antonio, TX 78231.

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