Student Clinical Training at Bastyr University

Clinic Checkup If you pursue one of Bastyr's graduate programs, you'll spend your first year immersed in books and classroom work, and then you’ll embark on the path of clinical training. Your clinical education is where it all comes together — all the classroom hours, the thousands of pages of reading, the late nights dedicated to memorizing the body's bones, muscle groups and/or meridians and points. This is where you begin to touch patients with your knowledge, your empathy, your diagnostic skills and intuition.

Through your clinical training, you will discover your own unique strengths as you peer into your future as a nutritionist, counselor, acupuncturist or naturopathic physician. For many of you, this is the time you've been waiting for all your life.

Clinical education is serious business. After all, health care can literally be a matter of life and death. That's why Bastyr University is dedicated to providing you with the best clinical education possible. In Bastyr's efforts to help you become a competent and confident clinician, we offer the most progressive education available.

State-of-the-Art Facility

In order to guarantee the highest consistency and continuity in quality education, the heart of the clinical education program is located at our teaching clinic, Bastyr Center for Natural Health (BCNH) in Seattle. This thriving metropolitan clinic is specifically designed to serve the unique needs of students, faculty and their patients. It is the largest and busiest natural health clinic in the Northwest. You will become an integral part of this nationally known center.

Bastyr Center boasts 40 patient care rooms, excellent air quality, natural lighting, environmentally friendly materials and systems throughout, patient parking beneath the building, and easy access for patients with special needs. The clinic houses new physical medicine equipment, such as a two-person sauna, a low-energy laser, therapeutic ultrasound machines and other physiotherapy machines. Bastyr Center also includes a library with computer terminals for student use, as well as natural and Chinese medicine dispensaries with comprehensive inventories. Bastyr Center is located at 3670 Stone Way North, in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle.

Experienced Supervising Faculty

Currently, 64 faculty providers comprise the medical staff of BCNH. The average clinical experience of these providers is eight years. The median number of years of experience of our core clinical faculty is over 10. Many members of the acupuncture medical staff have been in practice for over 20 years. All clinic supervisors must be licensed in their field, with documented education, training, experience and competence. Many of our faculty members have published books and articles in peer-reviewed journals, and some are award winning and internationally renowned experts in diverse areas of natural health.

Patient Contact Hours

At Bastyr, we provide as many or more patient contact hours as comparable schools. In the naturopathic medicine program, you will receive a minimum of 1,200 clinical training hours and approximately 600 patient contacts by the time you graduate, including the opportunity to provide health care to patients at 14 offsite clinical training sites. Acupuncture and Oriental medicine students average about 500 patient contacts during their education, including external learning sites in community clinics. Students enrolled in the master of science in nutrition and clinical health psychology spend about 600 hours working directly with patients.

Want to know more? Contact us at:

14500 Juanita Drive NE
Kenmore, WA 98028
E-mail: admissions at bastyr dot edu
Phone: (425) 602-3330
Fax: (425) 602-3090