|
The author of Doctor, Be Well: Integrating the Spirit of Healing with Scientific Medicine, Dr. David Shuch sees 4 to 6 patients per day at his holistic practice. “By limiting the flow of people, I give very individualized care,” he says. “For instance, when I bring a new patient in, my evaluation, diagnosis, treatment planning, and discussion may involve 4 to 5 hours of my undivided attention.”
Dr. Shuch emphasizes the importance of making sure there is balance and minimum stress in how the teeth come together. In addition to standard dental techniques, he uses a combination of homeopathy and nutritional therapies, sometimes even saving the teeth of patients who were told by dental specialists that they had to come out. Autonomic-response testing is part of his diagnostic work-up and energetic-healing techniques are used following dental surgery.
Dr. Shuch became interested in integrative medicine when his mother died of cancer in the late 1970s after a divorce. At the time, he was pursuing a career in science research. “Although I understood that the kinds of cancer treatments available to my mom followed ‘good scientific methods,’ I couldn’t help but feel that she was being turned into an unwitting guinea pig for the furtherance of cancer care,” he says. “Also, I could see firsthand how the emotional trauma related to the divorce had led to her getting cancer, although her doctors dismissed this at the time.” This experience made him rethink his career goals, and he decided to enter the helping professions. Once he became a healthcare practitioner, Dr. Shuch gravitated toward studying homeopathy because it presented such an “elegant stumbling block” to conventional science. Yet, bringing humanity into the therapeutic relationship is even more important to him than the particular “alternative” modalities he uses.
According to Dr. Shuch, the most important issue facing healthcare practitioners today is that they are stuck between their notion of science and how it ought to apply to healthcare. “Their notion is that healthcare ought to be an objective scientific affair that Isaac Newton would feel at home in,” he says. “The current methods of reimbursing for healthcare have turned this ‘scientific pursuit into the buying and selling of commodities, instead of the crafting of something very fine.” Dr. Shuch maintains that until doctors get past their purely mechanistic view of how the human body works, it will not be important enough for the culture of medicine to evolve away from a high-volume commodity business.
An excerpt from Doctor, Be Well: Integrating the Spirit of Healing with Scientific Medicine, can be viewed at www.drbewell.net.
|
