Bastyr University

Bastyr University was established in 1978 as the John Bastyr College of Naturopathic Medicine in Seattle. Four co-founders, Sheila Quinn, Joseph Pizzorno, Les Griffith, and Bill Mitchell, named the institution after John Bastyr, a teacher and advocate of naturopathy in the Seattle area. Baccalaureate, master's, and doctoral degree programs are offered. In 1984, the school was renamed Bastyr College; in 1994, it became Bastyr University.

In 1996, Bastyr relocated to its current location in the Saint Thomas Center, formerly St. Edward Seminary, a Catholic seminary building in Kenmore, Washington. Pizzorno served as president until his retirement in June 2000. During his tenure, Bastyr became the first accredited university of natural medicine and the first center for alternative medicine research funded by the National Institutes of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine, the predecessor to the controversial National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.

Its campus is surrounded by Saint Edward State Park's fir and hemlock forest. In November, 2005, the university purchased the property, which it had been leasing from the Archdiocese of Seattle. In 2010, Bastyr merged with Seattle Midwifery School to offer a Master of Science degree to become a direct-entry midwife eligible for certification.

In 2024, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that students who pursued doctorates of naturopathic medicine typically took on high levels of debt. For Bastyr, the median loan was $300,530 and the median earnings were $43,703, resulting in a debt to earnings ratio of 688%. This was the second highest ratio among graduate programs in the US, with only the naturopathic program at National University of Natural Medicine being higher.

The Tierney Basic Sciences Research Laboratory was the first research laboratory at a natural health university when it opened in 2000. One study, run jointly with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, was funded by a $3.1 million grant awarded in 2010 from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the National Institutes of Health.

Despite receiving research funds from NCCAM, Bastyr has been criticized for studying topics that are implausible or impossible for medical effectiveness, which are considered a waste of precious federal research funds. A paranormal study funded by NCCAM and conducted at Bastyr investigated extrasensory perception and "distance healing" of HIV/AIDS patients by psychic methods. Bastyr's study was based on earlier work on the topic by Elisabeth Targ, which has been marked as scientific fraud. An unidentified member of the NCCAM office described another of Bastyr's AIDS research projects – in which people with AIDS were surveyed as to what alternative therapies they were trying and how effective they were – as a "million-dollar fishing expedition."

Other pseudoscientific topics researched at Bastyr include homeopathy, energy medicine, and remote viewing. These topics are disproved by numerous rigorous investigations that preceded the studies conducted at Bastyr and have been criticized as serving only to justify NCCAM's continued existence.