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“We were fortunate to be have Lissa Rankin, M.D., as a guest speaker during her book signing tour for Mind Over Medicine. Although not new to us, Lissa’s topic of ‘Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself’ gave a refreshing outlook and history of how a busy, driven physician could re-evaluate her profession and integrate a holistic approach to healing the body. Her extensive research into the topic and subsequent embracing of a new approach to evaluating the causes and treatments for chronic and sometimes life threatening illnesses helped the participants gain a new perspective on healthcare. She energized the audience with new tools that would help ‘make their illnesses their business’ and move towards healing themselves in a new partnership with their healthcare providers.” -- Mary C. Shields, RN, MSN, Administrator, Community Cancer Research Foundation, Munster, IN
Heal Yourself: Mind Over Medicine
Lissa Rankin, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine and six other books, is a former OB/GYN physician, founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute training program for doctors and therapists, radical remission researcher, and founder of the health equity, trauma healing based non-profit Heal At Last.
After leaving her job in conventional medicine in 2007, Lissa began experimenting in her integrative medicine practice with what really helps resolve symptoms in people with chronic illness who have failed to improve with either conventional medicine or alternative medicine. All roads led to the same conclusion: People who are not responding to other treatments often have untreated, unhealed trauma, and treating that trauma can sometimes lead to seemingly miraculous radical remissions.
Upon realizing this epiphany, Lissa became a passionate ambassador for raising awareness about the importance of treating trauma as both preventive medicine and medical treatment for hard-to-treat mental and physical illnesses. Because old school psychoanalysis (talk therapy) and therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) do not effectively treat trauma on their own, and because medication, surgeries, and even most alternative medicine or spiritual healing techniques, such as acupuncture, meditation, or energy healing, only treat the symptoms of trauma, Lissa became a devoted student of many forms of trauma therapy, including Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.’s Internal Family Systems (IFS), Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Lawrence Heller’s NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), and Asha Clinton, Ph.D.’s Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT.) She also teaches about spiritual bypassing recovery for those who have used spirituality as a way to avoid healing their trauma.
In addition to her public health advocacy and health care reform activism, Lissa leads workshops online, at US retreat centers like Esalen, 1440, Omega, and Kripalu, and internationally. During the pandemic, Lissa played a public role in debunking “Conspirituality,” the Covid denialism, anti-vaccination propaganda, and conspiracy theories promoted by many wellness, yoga, mind-body medicine, alternative medicine, and spirituality influencers who got “red-pilled” during 2020. This shakeout anchored her as a physician influencer to trust who is grounded in science, open to the mystical, spiritually aware, and trauma-informed.
Lissa’s eighth book, Relationsick, co-written with Harvard psychiatrist Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv is about the link between relational trauma and medical illness and how healthy boundaries and Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy can help reverse diseases related to nervous system dysregulation caused by relational trauma. Publication date is Oct. 6, 2026.
Lissa lives with her partner Jeff Rediger and her housemate April Sweazy in the Bay Area, now that her daughter has flown the nest. She thrives on daily hikes in nature, dancing with her Bay Area dance community, singing, writing, DJ’ing music whenever she can, and healthy gourmet cooking.
Most Popular Topics:
Mind Over Medicine
The health care world consists of practitioners married to two often competing philosophies. Many hang their hats on modern medicine’s ever-evolving technological advances, insisting that technology is the panacea for all illness. Others, who often pressure patients to avoid conventional medicine, believe you can heal yourself and the practitioner’s job is to facilitate the self-healing process. This talk, which is ideal for holistic health conferences, focuses on how to combine the two, integrating the best of what modern medicine has to offer with techniques for facilitating physiological self-repair via the power of the mind.
Diagnose The REAL Reason You’re Sick
You might think it’s your genes, your hormones, or your biochemistry causing your illness- and you might be right. But often, the root causes of illness stem from unresolved emotional issues that lead to physiological manifestations within the body. To achieve optimal health, the root causes of illness must be diagnosed and treated, alongside any biochemical diagnosis and treatment. This talk, which is ideal for hospitals and health conferences, is similar to Lissa TEDx talk, The Shocking Truth About Your Health.
Can You Really Heal Yourself?
The placebo effect and its evil twin, the nocebo effect, prove that what we believe about our health manifests physically. But you don’t need a sugar pill or saline injection in order to heal yourself. By shifting negative beliefs about health to positive ones, you create a hormonal milieu that activates the body’s natural self-repair mechanisms. This talk, ideal for health and women’s conferences, focuses on what you can do to heal your beliefs so your body will follow.
How To Heal Yourself
Healing yourself is a six step process that requires positive belief, the support of a healer, the ability to tap into the body’s inner wisdom and knowing, the insight to be able to diagnose the underlying root causes of illness, the courage to implement a treatment plan aimed at healing the root causes of the illness, and after you’ve done what you can, the faith to surrender to the journey. This talk, ideal for health and women’s conferences, offers practical tools and audience participation so listeners can make their own self-diagnosis and write The Prescription, a self-guided holistic treatment plan, for themselves.
The Health Benefits of a Happy Professional Life
We all know that work stress is bad for your health, but did you know that you can literally work yourself to death? The scientific data proves that those who engage in work they love, manage work stress effectively, and learn how to counteract the body’s stress response with the relaxation response live longer, healthier lives. This talk, which is ideal for corporate audiences, focuses on how being more healthy in your professional life affects not just your job satisfaction but your physical health. It includes teaching a simple practice that counteracts the stress response and helps prevent its deleterious effects on the body.
The Health Benefits of Friendship
The scientific data proves that the more close friends we have, the healthier we are. Close friendships make you less likely to get sick and more likely to recover if you get sick. They even increase your life expectancy. This talk, which is ideal for women’s conferences, churches, and other health and spirituality gatherings, focuses on the sacred contracts we unconsciously or explicitly make with our friends. It also covers tips for how to be a good friend and how to attract positive friendships into your life, not just because friends alleviate loneliness, but because friendship is preventative medicine.
