A Trade School for Highly Educated Hippies
Why I became a naturopathic doctor, and what finally made it real.
By Dr. Adam Graves, ND, LAc, Colorado Natural Medicine & Acupuncture, Castle Rock, CO
People ask me sometimes why I do this work. The honest answer didn’t arrive all at once. It came together slowly, out of a few different things happening around the same time, and then, in one specific conversation with a student I’d never met, it clicked all the way into place.
Thirteen Years of the Same Answer
I grew up in South Dakota, and I was sick a lot, allergies and asthma that never really let up. I saw the top specialists available, five or six different allergists over the years. My family had good insurance. None of that was the problem.
What I remember most isn’t any single appointment. It’s a feeling that kept showing up, over and over. Every doctor’s visit ended in roughly the same place: this is the best we can do. Nobody was being careless. They were good people, genuinely trying to help. But there was a quiet sadness underneath it every time, the sense that with all the resources and all the education in the room, this was still the ceiling.
Not one of those specialists ever asked about my diet.
A Bastyr Student Fixes What Five Allergists Couldn’t
As a first-year student at Bastyr, we were encouraged to get seen at the school’s teaching clinic. I was the patient of a fourth-year student, further along in training than I was, with a supervising doctor somewhere down the hall.
I told her about my asthma and allergies. She listened, and suggested I might be sensitive to dairy, and that it might be worth cutting out.
I followed her advice. Within two weeks I felt better than I had in ten years.
Nobody in over a decade of specialists had ever said that sentence to me. A student, in a teaching clinic, on one visit, did.
Why Acupuncture? Why not just Naturopathic Medicine?
Bastyr ran its naturopathic teaching clinic and its acupuncture teaching clinic under the same roof. In my second year, I finally went in for a treatment.
I remember exactly what I thought afterward, because I’d never felt anything like it: what is this? Not the physical relief I’d gotten from cutting dairy. Something in my actual nervous system had shifted, in a way advice alone had never touched.
Naturopathic medicine, up to that point, had been a lot of listening and a lot of good advice. Acupuncture was the first thing that felt like physical, hands-on work, and that mattered to me. I grew up doing carpentry, working with my hands. Advice never fully fit who I was. This did.
I added the acupuncture master’s onto my doctorate that year, three more years of school stacked on top of what I’d already signed up for. More debt, more hours, no real hesitation. I knew intuitively it was the right call.
What I’d Tell You If You Asked Me in the Room
People sometimes ask why naturopathic medicine instead of whatever they’ve already tried. Here’s the honest answer, not the version out of a textbook.
I don’t know another system of medicine built to actually restore health, rather than just manage it. Western medicine is genuinely good at managing and maintaining. For an intense, acute case, I’m glad it exists. But it’s built on finding the one broken thing and correcting it, and it tends to stop there. It rarely has much to offer the person asking, what else can I do? How do I actually participate in this?
Most people don’t leave a doctor’s appointment feeling more empowered than when they walked in. I don’t think I ever did, in thirteen years of appointments. The people who end up here want to be part of their own care, not just receive instructions for it.
Reflecting Back On My Father’s Care
I’ve talked before about my father’s death from cardiovascular disease being the reason this became my life’s work. Looking back now, with what I actually know, I see it differently than I did at the time.
Conventional medicine gave him one side of the picture. It’s a mechanistic, reductionistic system: find the thing that’s broken, correct it, and the rest is supposed to follow. That has real value for managing something acute and severe. But it had nothing for the parts of him that wanted to participate, to change his life, not just receive a treatment plan.
Watching that up close is when I stopped seeing a future for myself inside that system. Not because it was wrong. Because it stopped short of where I wanted to spend my career.
What Twenty Years of Practicing Has Actually Taught Me
If you’d told me this at 25, I wouldn’t have believed you: giving someone the right information is nowhere near enough to help them change.
At 25, you think you know everything. Just stop eating badly and you’ll feel better, right? It’s not that simple, and it never was. We’re well past the information age problem now anyway, everything I learned in school that used to be genuinely hard to access is one search away for anyone. Information was never really the bottleneck.
What I’ve actually built my practice around since then is closer to the art of medicine than the science of it: helping someone build a real plan, one specific enough that change actually feels possible, not just handing them a list of things to do differently. That’s the part nobody teaches you in year one. It’s the part that took twenty years to get right.
At Colorado Natural Medicine & Acupuncture in Castle Rock, that’s still the whole premise, restoring health instead of just managing it, and helping people actually participate in getting there. Not a rejection of real medicine. A different way of practicing it, one I found almost by accident, through a first-year appointment I almost didn’t book, and a second-year treatment that changed my whole nervous system before it changed my mind.
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