Read Excerpts from Dr. Shuch’s Books:

In 2003, I published my first book, Doctor, Be Well: Integrating the Spirit of Healing with Scientific Medicine. It is a book written for doctors, patients, and caregivers. In it, I have put together a framework for understanding how modern medicine and alternative and complementary health care practices fit together, and I have tried to convey how doctoring can be a path to the growth of the Spirit. The book has been well received in both the mainstream and the alternative health communities.

In 2005, my second book came out. The Charm Carver is an allegory on healing and the growth of the soul. Unlike Doctor, Be Well, The Charm Carver is written as a work of literary fiction, meant for the broadest possible audience. It is a story about Simon, a charm carver, told through the reminiscences of Madeline, a woman near the end of her life, reflecting upon her early memories. The Charm Carver is available for purchase from the book’s homepage. Click here to read the first three chapters of The Charm Carver.

In early 2018, my third book, Letters to a Young Healer, was published by River Grove Books. If you want to read an excerpt of it, it is fully searchable on its page on Amazon. Letters to a Young Healer is something of a sequel to The Charm Carver in that they share elements in the story line, but it can be read and enjoyed without having first read The Charm Carver.  In Letters to a Young Healer, the protagonist in The Charm Carver, Madeline, has died and among her affects were found a trove of old letters in the back of her writing desk.  These were correspondence from her uncle, James, a palliative care physician, to whom she wrote, asking for advice after what was for her, a confusing apprenticeship with Simon, the charm carver.  In that apprenticeship she learned what it meant to bring a spirit of healing into one’s work, but she knew that she didn’t have the talent or interest to carve charms. She didn’t know what to do with her life, but she knew she wanted to help people in some way as Simon had.  We follow her development as we read through the twelve letters from her uncle.   The point of this book, which was four years in the making despite it’s diminutive size, is to spell out in the clearest possible way my approach, my philosophy of healing.  All three of these books have this as their aim, they just approach this subject from different places.  Many years ago, I was taught that for anyone to move up the ladder in the growth of spirit, they first must find a way to help others to occupy the rung they wish to step up from. It is a strong wish in my life that, besides the dentistry that I continue to put in my patient’s mouths, that these books are what I will be remembered for, long after I am gone. 

In early 2022, my fourth book, Healing Presence: A Science of Spirit, will be published by Greenleaf Books. Two of my mentors, Dr Larry Dossey, MD a best-selling author and the executive editor of the scientific journal, “Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing,” and Dr Brent Bauer, MD, Program Director for the Program on Integrative Medicine at the Mayo Clinic, both encouraged me to put my ideas about healing into a clear, non-fiction form; more explicit than the implicit forms in The Charm Carver and Letters To A Young Healer. In order to accomplish this, I had to come up with a theory of consciousness, a related theory of life and from these a theory of healing.  Then, on the basis of that theory I was able to devise various practices that if followed with some diligence, would bring the reader/practitioner to a state of new possibilities with regards to healing.  If you would like to learn more about Healing Presence: A Science of Spirit, click HERE.