A timely, profound, multidimensional guide on alternative methods of medical care delivery.
A former immunologist lays the holistic groundwork for what she perceives as imperative changes needed in modern medicine.
In her timely guide, health and wellness coach Zhong, aka Dr. Z, addresses the critical conundrum of burnout affecting medical workers. With the problem amplified by the current pandemic, she recognizes the detrimental effects of chronic stress on the health care community and outlines how beneficial change can occur through her 12-step transformative program. She begins by isolating seven signs associated with burnout, which she likens to a soldier’s PTSD, a “moral injury” where someone’s “core value, identity, purpose, and self-worthiness are jeopardized by loyalty to the institute.” Withdrawal, weakness, and loss of compassion as a frontline worker can become a crisis, the author writes. While she concedes that burnout is an inevitable consequence, Zhong asserts that it allows opportunities for radical, beneficial paradigm shifts in health care systems. These changes include a general revision toward more health-focused approaches, the integration of holistic healing into disease management procedures, and the incorporation of organic learning and unlearning processes into one’s scope of medical practice. The author’s 12-step program for “future doctors for the new world” forms the book’s core and includes practical guidance on envisioning the future of health care, focusing on personal and professional attention and intention, centering oneself amid a chaotic world, mastering emotions, and finding empowerment. Zhong believes the modern practice of medical care is generally and irrationally grounded in both a fear and an avoidance of death. Her program uniquely encourages an impartiality concerning life and death, as both are “equally beautiful parts of the process.”
To better illustrate and support her methodology in revamping medical practices, Zhong effectively includes aspects of spiritualism, poetry, allegorical storytelling, and personal observations in the manual. A section chronicling her own history growing up in Shanghai alongside her experiences as a biomedical researcher forms the basis of her ideology and affords readers a deeper perspective on the author. Watershed influences like practicing qi gong energy work and meditation became the impetus for Zhong’s eventual career change as she passionately envisioned new directions. The author openly describes her immense passion for creating a sanctuary training center for “soul-crushed and energetically depleted” health care professionals who desire renewed clarity and purpose and, most importantly, to “experience various healing modalities that are not taught in medical school.” Despite the pandemic lockdown, she proceeded with developing the Medicine Mage Academy, a yearlong, intuitive holistic training program conducted in a nature-based setting and encompassing aspects of organic learning and “consciousness downloading.” But in later chapters, the author veers into uncharted territory and the book loses some of its initial focus. Some readers may find her more science-minded inclusion of Taoism, the quantum entanglement phenomenon, interspecies telepathy, and theories on artificial intelligence and superconsciousness overly complex and distracting from her central theme of transformational wellness practices through human interconnectedness. Those able to extract and retain the volume’s central message will find Zhong’s enlightening and liberating suggestions on revamping health care a breath of fresh air.
A timely, profound, multidimensional guide on alternative methods of medical care delivery.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-5510-0812-5
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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