When Xuemei Zhong left her lab at Boston University’s medical school behind to become a coach for burned-out medical professionals, she realized it was not just a turning point for her career, but for medicine as a whole.

Zhong explains the shift in her latest book, The Medicine Mage:

So, the bottom line is that both the healthcare sector and the biomedical research enterprise are at the final struggle and both systems need true paradigm shifts. Before that happens, burnout and depression of physicians and biomedical scientists cannot be prevented. Burnout is the inevitable consequence of the current healthcare and research system. It’s like a sinking Titanic. It’s big and may take some time to sink. Many people are still enjoying what is being served on the sinking boat. But that doesn’t mean you should not jump now.

In the book, which Kirkus Reviews calls “a timely, profound, multidimensional guide on alternative methods of medical care delivery,” Zhong offers a 12-step framework for moving from a data-driven, disease-focused concept of health care to one that is holistic and strives to spread health, not merely limit disease. “I would love for people in health care and medical science [to] read the book and use [it] as a bridge to learn and explore future medicine beyond the framework of the current health care system,” she says.

Zhong’s move away from the pathology lab where she had built her career was inspired by a particularly difficult year in which her father, her mentor, and a longtime colleague all died. “I was getting lost in my career,” she says. “I would sacrifice being by my father’s side on his deathbed” in order to spend more time at work. Seeing her mentor, a celebrated oncologist, die of cancer reminded her that lab results cannot provide all the answers. “We as scientists are always proud of data-driven science and technology, and we feel very powerful, but when we get sick, get diabetes, get cancer, suddenly it takes the power away,” she says. “It was very devastating for many of us to watch.”

Zhong, a native of Shanghai, began training as a coach in 2015. Providing guidance to burned-out doctors and researchers is now her main focus, along with creating a retreat center that will serve as an additional resource. “I am glad that I [made] this shift,” she says. “It’s really fulfilling—my calling, my purpose.”

“Coaching is very different than education,” Zhong explains. “Our medical and health care practice has been focused on education. You’re told what to do and what not to do, what is good and what’s not good.” In contrast, “coaching is not a top-down, authority- and expert-centered practice,” she says. “Clients are the drivers of change, and coaching succeeds only when they have an interest in making a transformation.”

She sees a connection to archery, an activity she has become committed to. “[Initially], I was looking for a sport for my children, and we happen to live not far away from an archery range,” she says, so she began taking lessons along with her son. But the sport soon became something more: “The reason I love it is it’s really my way of meditation. It’s very Zen. When you understand the archery practice, it’s more than a sport.” She hopes to explore the meditative aspects of archery in an upcoming book.

Understanding meditation helped Zhong with the more intuitive aspects of writing a coaching book, a process very different from the articles and lab reports she was used to. “For scientific research, you have to do the experiment, collect the data, and then the results become facts on the page,” she says. “But when I write the book, it’s different.” She describes writing “in a very cohesive state, your heart, your mind, your spirit aligned. It’s very different than the scientific research experience.”

Despite the fundamental differences between her two careers, Zhong has found few objections from her more science-minded colleagues. (The one time she remembers receiving push back was when she was still in academia and a reviewer suggested that she leave her training in coaching out of her bio on a grant application, arguing that the funder might see it as a disadvantage.) Many, she says, have been willing to explore the necessary mindset shift.

“What I wrote in this book is…the future of medicine. To explore beyond the data-driven and a “reality”-based research approach is different,” she says. For instance, “in our research, we look at disease as something bad, something broken that we have to fix.” As medicine shifts to a new paradigm, however, disease takes on a new role: “The disease has meaning,” and doctors will succeed by going beyond treating symptoms and understanding how the disease affects the patient on all levels.”

This, says Zhong, is crucial if medical practitioners want to remain relevant as technological capabilities increase. “Everything can be replaced, even doctors,” she points out. “Pay attention to how technology is moving” is the piece of advice she would give every incoming medical student if she had the opportunity. She would also encourage them to ask themselves the questions she explores in The Medicine Mage. “That is what this book is all about, a look at the future of medicine,” she says. “These 12 steps will give you the direction, the insight [to look] beyond what classical mechanical medicine is all about. Know the meaning of disease. Know the meaning of life. Know the meaning of death. Medicine is not about avoidance of grief or even death. It’s way beyond that.”

Zhong hopes that her broad approach to the future of medicine will capture the interest of readers outside the medical field in addition to doctors and scientists reevaluating their career paths. Covid-19 “is urging us to reflect on the medical system. Throughout the pandemic, a lot of issues were exposed more clearly,” she says, in economic and political contexts as well as in the medical field. For anyone who wants to understand and be part of the changing world, Zhong says The Medicine Mage contains “the 12 steps I think will help them.”

Sarah Rettger is a writer and bookseller in Massachusetts.