WANP Board Member Featured in Seattle Times Article

6 June 2026

WANP Board Member Greg Yasuda, ND, VNMI, was recently featured in an article on listening to your body after injury or when in pain:

Listening to the body

Injury can be a loaded word that brings up beliefs, attitudes and fears, says Greg Yasuda, associate professor of the School of Naturopathic Medicine at Bastyr University. It reflects how you think about health, and what it means to you, he says. How you think about your body at age 50 will be different from how you thought about it when you were 20, he says.

His father, for example, is experiencing heart failure at 89. He doesn’t care to do more, so Yasuda, a doctor of naturopathic medicine, doesn’t push him to take on new protocols. If his dad were panicked and upset, he would approach him differently.

When a patient comes to see Yasuda, he listens to what they want to share about the pain, how it’s affecting their daily life, and their concerns — and he looks for connections in what they say.

In Chinese medicine, there’s a correlation between organs and emotions. Lungs are connected to grief, for example, he says, so if someone has an issue with their lungs, he might ask questions about grief. As a student, he didn’t give these connections much credence. But after being in practice for 26 years, he sees them all the time.

He tries to get his patients to see their pain from a new perspective, aiming to help them come back to balance in their body, whether through rest or finding ways to lower their stress.

“Health itself isn’t very motivating,” Yasuda said. “Most of us know what we should do, and we don’t do it. It’s this sort of distant payoff that we don’t measure.”

What he finds more motivating for people is often unexpected — he talks to his patients about what brings them joy.

As a young naturopath, one of his patients had severe eczema, and despite multiple approaches, nothing had worked to resolve it. He found out that she was stressed about her grandkids moving, so they came up with a plan for her to see them regularly after they moved. Later, he bumped into her, and she told him her eczema was 60% better, after nothing else helped.

“If we’re not enjoying our life, we don’t have a lot of incentive to make it better or make it longer,” Yasuda says.

One of his patients, Ann Bradford, is an avid walker, who walks anywhere from 2 to 8 miles daily. But when she started having severe pain in her knee, she found herself going up and down the stairs one foot at a time.

Yasuda noticed her hamstring felt tight, so he suggested softening into the area that hurt. And then asked her if there was another purpose for the pain, a reason it was showing up right now and if there was something for her to learn from it, she recalls.

Her mind went back to difficult childhood experiences. Making the connection to that time helped her see that experience in a deeper way.

“It was so powerful and profound I literally burst into tears on the way out of his office,” Bradford tells me. Within a week, the 72-year-old was back on track with her regular walk routine.