A body can hold more than one calling at once, and few lives make that as plain as this one: a flight navigator who became a healer, a gymnast who became a chairman, a man given less than a year to live who is, more than forty years later, still practicing, still teaching, and still, in his words, taking the next single step of a very long journey.
Dr. Mark Crapo is the Founder of iCARE, the Center for Acupuncture, Restoration & Energy, in Battle Creek, Michigan, and today serves as Chairman of the Michigan LARA Board (Licensing and Regulatory Affairs), the state regulatory system governing the profession he once fought to have formally recognized. It is a fitting place for him to have landed. Little in his story moved in a straight line, and yet each turn, the classroom, the cockpit, the hospital bed, the treatment table, seems in hindsight to have been pointed at exactly this.
A Triple Major and a Body in Motion
Long before acupuncture entered his life, Dr. Crapo was, by his own account, something of an overachiever in motion. At Central Michigan University, he completed a triple major and a triple minor, spanning Education, Physical Education, Religion, Sex Education, and Sports Medicine, and he became, notably, the first person to earn a degree in Teaching the Academic Study of Religions in the Public Schools.
He made the Dean’s List every semester, graduated Cum Laude from the Honors College, and belonged to the National Honor Society, serving as President of the National Honor Fraternity and the Sports Club Federation. He was also a member of the National Physical Education Fraternity, a Varsity Gymnast, Captain of the Judo Team, a member of the Karate Club, and an athletic trainer for the Women’s Track and Field team, the Women’s Gymnastics team, and the Men’s Baseball team.
It is worth pausing on one detail he mentions almost in passing: he was invited to the Olympic trials for Judo. He did not go. He took a job instead. Rather than framing it as a regret, it reads simply as one of many forks where he chose the practical road, and the practical road, it turns out, kept leading him somewhere extraordinary.
The Cockpit, the Diagnosis, and the Teacher Who Changed Everything
After teaching junior and senior high school, Dr. Crapo joined the Air Force as a flight navigation officer. It was there, in service, that something in his environment triggered an autoimmune disorder, a condition serious enough that he sought treatment at hospitals in San Antonio, Texas, and in Sacramento, Vallejo, and San Francisco, California.
The treatments did not work. Doctors told him he had less than a year to live.
What happened next is the hinge of the entire story. His martial arts teacher, Tri Thong Dang, suggested he try acupuncture. “It saved my life,” he says of that suggestion, a sentence that carries the weight of everything that followed. He did not simply recover and move on. He decided, in his words, that he wanted to give back and help others with health challenges, and that decision reshaped the rest of his working life.
From Battle Creek to Hollywood and Back Again
Dr. Crapo returned to school, earning a Master’s in Acupuncture from the California Acupuncture College’s Los Angeles campus, graduating in the top five of his class. He continued on to earn his Doctor of Oriental Medicine, again finishing in the top five.
He practiced first in Hollywood and Torrance, California, treating a clientele that included writers, directors, stunt coordinators, and movie stars. It is easy to imagine the practice he might have built there, in that particular economy of fame and physical strain. But when his daughter was born, he made another of his practical choices: he left it behind and returned home to Battle Creek, Michigan, to raise his family.
Building a Practice, and a Second Career, at the Same Time
Back in Battle Creek, he opened Health & Energy, PC, and within a short time the practice was booked months in advance. He expanded into a larger office, then opened a second location in Kalamazoo, hiring former classmates from California to join him.
For a decade, Dr. Crapo personally saw between 120 and 125 patients a week. Eventually he scaled back to part time clinical work and took on an entirely different role: Senior Vice President for Technology and Training at Symmetry Global, where he formulated the company’s nutritional and herbal products for markets across the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, the Arab countries, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Guam, Saipan, and Japan. He traveled two weeks out of every month, giving seminars across those markets.
In 2017, Symmetry Global merged into Xyngular, a company Dr. Crapo had also helped start, and he stayed on as a consultant there and at Pure Haven, a home and personal care company built on entirely organic products.
Then, in 2018, he formally launched a new, part-time practice of his own: iCARE, the Center for Acupuncture, Restoration & Energy, LLC.
Complementary, Not Alternative
Ask Dr. Crapo how he describes his work, and he is precise about the language. He does not practice “alternative” medicine. He practices complementary medicine, and he is quick to refer patients to an MD, a DO, a physical therapist, or a chiropractor when that is what the situation calls for.
His clinical toolkit draws on several distinct traditions, each with its own lineage. He practices Ryodoraku, a Japanese style of acupuncture developed by a physician who was also an acupuncturist. He practices Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM. He uses French Auriculotherapy, first developed by a French neurosurgeon, and Battlefield Acupuncture, developed by a United States military surgeon.
In TCM, Dr. Crapo trained not only in the fundamentals but in internal medicine, geriatrics, pain management, and addiction treatment. After graduating, he went on to study Japanese Shoni Shin, a pediatric technique, along with methods from several other Japanese masters, including further work in Ryodoraku. Later still, he studied Battlefield Acupuncture and Electro Acupuncture Medicine. “Combining styles helps patients heal faster,” he says, and the sentence doubles as something of a personal credo: a career built on refusing to specialize too narrowly, on the theory that no single tradition holds every answer.
That same philosophy carried over into his nutrition work. “Best of the East with the best of the West,” is how he describes his approach to formulating products, combining what he calls thousands of years of herbal wisdom with current Western nutritional science.
The Fight for a License That Did Not Yet Exist
When Dr. Crapo first moved home to Michigan to practice, he was, by his account, the first person with a doctorate in Oriental medicine to do so in the state. Only a handful of others were practicing anything similar at the time: a DO and his wife, a nurse practitioner, in Lansing, and a husband and wife MD team in the Detroit area.
There was, at that point, no dedicated license for the practice of acupuncture in Michigan, and the practitioners found themselves under investigation by the State Attorney General’s office. The DO in Lansing was arrested for practicing without a license. It took a long fight, in his words, before the matter was resolved and the state established its own licensing structure for acupuncture.
Today, Dr. Crapo helps oversee Michigan’s licensing and regulatory system. He is currently in his second term on the Michigan LARA Board, having served one term as Vice Chair before being named Chairman, a role that puts him, decades later, on the other side of the very fight that once threatened his profession.
A Practice Without Borders
The World Health Organization lists roughly 120 diseases, disorders, and syndromes that respond well to acupuncture, and over more than 40 years of practice, Dr. Crapo estimates he has treated nearly all of them. Patients have flown in from California and Florida for treatment, as well as from Europe.
His reach extends well beyond Michigan in other ways too. He has been invited to teach at hospitals in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, and the Philippines, extending his experience into international clinical and educational settings.
Among the achievements he speaks of with particular pride is a treatment protocol for faster, less painful childbirth, a technique he developed originally as a senior research project and later saw published in an international medical journal. It is a method his son has also gone on to use successfully in his own practice, a detail that connects two generations of the family’s clinical work.
Passing the Torch
That son, Andrew, is now carrying the practice forward, and Dr. Crapo, in his seventies, speaks of it with evident pride. “It fills me with pride to see my son carrying on into the future with what he’s learned and those he’s been helping find health,” he says, a rare moment in the conversation where the clinician steps back and the father speaks instead.
The Mat, the Page, and Fifty Years of Discipline
Outside the clinic, Dr. Crapo has spent more than 50 years practicing martial arts. He holds black belts in both Judo and Aikido, and years after being promoted to 7th degree black belt in Aikido, the Kobayashi family named him Kancho, or Headmaster, of the worldwide Seidokan Aikido organization, a title that sits quietly, alongside all the clinical ones.
When he is not treating patients or training, he reads journals and science fiction novels, a small, human detail that rounds out a career otherwise defined by titles, treatments, and travel.
A Single Step
Dr. Crapo closes his reflections with a line from Laozi’s Tao Te Ching: “Even the longest journey starts with a single step.” He applies the idea to health as much as to life, seeing better health as a journey that begins with a single decision to move forward.
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