President's Welcome
Welcome to Bastyr University! This year Bastyr celebrates our 40th anniversary. Over the past four decades, Bastyr has grown into an exemplar in higher education and the healing arts, now offering 20 degree programs in the natural health arts and sciences. Bastyr Center for Natural Health, our Seattle teaching clinic, has for years been the largest natural health clinic in the Pacific Northwest. In 2012, we expanded into California to offer the only accredited doctoral program for naturopathic medicine in the state. We continue to grow and expand our programs and our influence of the health care environments in Washington and California, and throughout the nation.
I have been personally aware of and engaged with Bastyr for over 20 years and have just this year humbly accepted the role of president. Bastyr, through the combination of our programs, our faculty, students, alumni and staff, continues to develop leadership in helping our communities to engage with health care from a different perspective. While conventional Western medicine starts with a premise of identifying disease and seeking interventions to try to mitigate the symptoms of disease, natural medicine starts with the holistic view that the mind, body, spirit and nature are able to work together to create sustainable health. Intervention here is based upon identifying the barriers to health that exist, and then allowing individuals to regain health using the most natural interventions possible.
The world in which we will study together and in which you will practice is more engaged with and open to using the natural, health-first approach to living a healthy life. Increasingly more individuals and more health care providers are relying on natural medicine professionals such as the ones that Bastyr educates. These disciplines and professions are indeed a significant part of achieving the nation’s goals of seeing healthier people live longer lives, increasing the satisfaction of patients with their health care experiences, and at the same time reducing the overall costs of achieving these aspirations.
The faculty and staff at Bastyr University are committed to preparing our students to be leaders in this natural health revolution, and to providing an educational experience that integrates mind, body, spirit and nature.
I look forward to meeting you and welcoming you to Bastyr University, and to working together with you to achieve our mission of changing the health of our communities.
Yours in health,
Harlan Patterson, MBA, CPA
Bastyr University President