Dr. Griffith’s legacy lives on in a clinic where exploration is exquisite, and the conversation is medicine.

By Ellen Hiatt

The weeping willow hung low against the late summer sunshine at the skirt of Bastyr University’s ethnobotanical garden. Outside its canopy, the season had dried the seed pods of the rich collection of native plants growing along the nearly mile-long Sacred Seeds Trail. Catharine Griffith walked the trail, brushing her hands across the sun-kissed fronds, pausing at a residence hall named for her late husband and the plaque that acknowledges him as one of the university’s four co-founders.

He lived by that, Catharine agreed. “The answers are within us — within our own bodies, which tell us what care we need, whether that’s self-care, naturopathic medicine, or Western medicine. We also know the relationships we need to nurture.” And so, when her husband passed suddenly this year, she and the clinic’s staff knew what to do. They had each other. They were the team he built.

Dr. Lester Griffith was always building something. He began his career as a U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman, serving as an admiral’s writer, onboard a ship, and in Vietnam as a young man. After earning his naturopathic doctorate, he opened his first clinic in Lynnwood, where a patient soon asked him to deliver her baby—the first of more than 4,000 infants he and Catharine would go on to deliver. He earned a nursing degree, met and married Catharine in the process, became a midwife, led change in Washington State legislation to make it among the most progressive in the country for naturopathic care, and co-founded Bastyr University. He served on Bastyr’s Board of Trustees for years. By the time he opened a clinic in Gig Harbor, he was in his late seventies—still studying peptides, exosomes, stem cells, and most of all mitochondria; caring for patients, researching, speaking, and writing until his last day.

“He was curious about everything. He was a lifelong learner,” said Catharine. “We call it a gentle curiosity… He was an observer.”

That curiosity shaped not only his practice but the people he gathered around him. Dr. Ludwig Mantay ND/ MPH — known simply as Dr. Ludwig to everyone in the clinic and to his patients — arrived at his first meeting as a freshly credentialed doctor, expecting to discuss joining the practice. Dr. Griffith shook his hand and welcomed him as a partner. Like Dr. Griffith, Dr. Ludwig had served as a Navy corpsman, retiring as a Chief after 21-plus years of active service, before a loved one’s declining health drove him to seek answers — answers that led toward naturopathy, which then led to him earning his Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine at Bastyr in 2025. Before graduation, a teacher-mentor had advised him not to seek a residency in a clinic run by doctors younger than him, and Dr. Griffith — decades his senior — fit that bill perfectly. He was the “OG” – the Original that Dr. Ludwig needed. “The greatest gift Dr. Griffith gave me was the space to be myself,” Dr. Ludwig stated.

“He could have picked anybody he wanted to pass on his clinic, but he chose you,” Catharine told Dr. Ludwig.

The choice proved to be one of Dr. Griffith’s keenest. Patient Care Coordinator Dr. Paula “Pauli” Mitchell points to Dr. Ludwig’s years of emergency medicine, clinical and research lab experience in the Navy as foundational. “It gives him such insight and such understanding that, as a diagnostician, I don’t know too many people who can touch him. Because even Dr. Griffith said, ‘He is one of the best diagnosticians I have ever seen.’ Just flat out.”

One of their own employees knows this as well as anyone. Medical assistant and receptionist Danielle St. Amand, who had served Dr. Griffith at the clinic for over four years, routinely monitored her own labs every six months and, in November 2025, handed the results to Dr. Griffith for a second opinion. He read them, said nothing, and told her to take them to Dr. Ludwig. She asked, half joking, whether she was dying. He didn’t answer. He just gestured toward the door — go.

Dr. Ludwig recommended more tests, then sent her back to her own doctors to insist they order them. “He gave me power — internal power — not to leave until I got these tests done, and not to take no for an answer,” she said. The labs confirmed what Dr. Griffith had already seen and quietly passed along. He had handed it to his partner. Dr. Griffith empowered everybody, she said, and respected everybody’s opinion, including hers. She misses him greatly.

That spirit of exploration—enthusiastic, rigorous, and deeply personal—runs through the entire clinic. Dr. Mitchell is straight-up giddy with it. She first encountered Dr. Griffith as a student at Bastyr, when he lectured on the endocannabinoid system. “It’s one of those exquisite things,” she said. “When you look at the biochemistry of the endocannabinoid system, and what it does and how it moves — it is like watching a beautiful symphony, each part contributing to the whole. It’s so fabulous.” She marvels that Dr. Griffith championed that system and worked with peptides in ways others hadn’t yet touched, long before either became a wider conversation in medicine. “Dr. Griffith was always pushing like that. It was beautiful to watch him.”

Dr. Ludwig carries the same quality of curiosity, in a louder key. He tells the story of watching a four-year-old eating lunch with his father by a grocery store waterfall; all of a sudden the little boy noticed the waterfall and eagerly went to it — hand in the water, hand out, hand in again, calling excitedly for his father to look at the water flowing over his hand. In that moment, Dr. Ludwig decided that was exactly how he wanted to meet the world for the rest of his life: with excited, childlike curiosity.

But curiosity at this clinic doesn’t stop at the biochemistry of life. Dr. Mitchell sees it turned toward something harder to measure than a lab result. “There are days when the conversation is the medicine,” she said, describing appointments where patients come in to talk — to gain perspective on themselves and their world. Because what the clinic asks of people is not small. “A lot of what we do with people changes their world pretty dramatically,” she said. It requires radical shifts in how you eat, how you socialize, how you see yourself. “And everybody doesn’t want to change with you, or doesn’t want you to change.”

Caring, she noted, is “extraordinarily complex.” Much of their work at the clinic, she said, is helping people figure out how to be different and how to facilitate change to a healthier version of themselves. The clinic becomes both doctor and
support system—a community built on the belief that the body already holds its own wisdom.

Dr. Griffith’s plaque says as much:

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

The Dynamic Regenerative Care Clinic in Gig Harbor, WA (253) 509-0424 provides naturopathic care focused on whole-person regenerative medicine. The clinic continues its practice in honor of Dr. Lester Griffith, ND/RN, Midwife, loving husband, loving father, and co-founder of Bastyr University.