Optimize wildcard searching for a NVARCHAR(MAX) column
Yes and no.

It is the best built in way.

You COULD handle it on application layer and ALSO store the text in something made for that (i.e. a search engine style like Lucene).

You COULD roll your own. Trigram/Trigraph style. Will use a lot of programming and a lot of space, but will make queries faster. 

One way to get an index seek for a leading %wildcard by Aaron Bertrand

Trigram Wildcard String Search in SQL Server by Paul White

Have what you need to get started there ;)