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- Business of Healthcare
- Friendship
- Healing
- Healthcare
- Holistic Health
- Integrative Medicine
- Mind-Body Connection
- Motivation
- Patient Education
- Spirituality
- Trauma
- Wellness
- Womens Health
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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.
Most Popular Topics:
The Medicine of Belonging
Why Healthy Relationships May Be One of the Most Powerful Determinants of Your Health
We have spent decades talking about diet, exercise, sleep, and stress as pillars of health. But there is another biological necessity we don’t talk about nearly enough: human connection. Loneliness and social isolation affect the nervous system, immune system, cardiovascular system, and overall health. Yet simply telling people to “find community” isn’t enough. Many people have never been taught how to build relationships that actually feel safe, reciprocal, nourishing, and sustainable. In this keynote, Lissa explores the science of social connection and gives audiences practical tools for cultivating the kinds of relationships that support health rather than undermine it. She explores belonging, friendship, boundaries, discernment, reciprocity, and the difference between being surrounded by people and actually being intimately connected and experiencing the health benefits of that.
Ideal for: corporate audiences, healthcare organizations, women’s conferences, leadership events, wellness conferences, community organizations.
Relationsick
How Putting Ourselves Last Is Destroying Our Health- And How To Heal
What if your illness is not just a medical problem; it’s a marital problem? What if the relationship you have with your partner, parent, boss, friend, colleague, or community is affecting your physical health? Based on her latest book, co-written with Harvard psychiatrist Jeffrey Rediger, Lissa introduces the concept of relationsickness: the ways chronic relational stress, unresolved trauma, loneliness, coercive dynamics, lack of boundaries, and persistent feelings of unsafety can keep the nervous system in a state of dysregulation.But this isn’t a talk about blaming other people for our symptoms. It’s about developing the capacity to recognize relational patterns, protect ourselves from harmful dynamics, repair what can be repaired, and cultivate relationships in which our nervous systems can finally exhale. Audiences learn why “take better care of yourself” is sometimes incomplete advice—and why relational health belongs in the conversation about physical health, as much so or more so than talking about nutrition, exercise, avoiding bad habits, or following doctor’s orders.
Ideal for: healthcare, corporate wellness, women’s conferences, mental health organizations, hospitals, and audiences interested in trauma-informed health.
Friendship Is Medicine
The Relationship Skills We Were Never Taught
We know health depends on community connections, not just our families and partners, but our friendships too. But most adults were never taught how to actually make friends. Having just relocated after living in one place for seventeen years, Lissa is now on a personal quest to rebuild community somewhere she knows nobody, so this is very personal to her now! As adults, friendship requires more than finding people we like. We need to know how to initiate connection, tolerate vulnerability, create positivity, communicate needs, navigate conflict, set boundaries, repair ruptures, offer and require reciprocity, and discern when a relationship is no longer healthy. Drawing from the science of connection and her work on relational health, Lissa gives audiences a practical framework for creating a friendship ecosystem that supports wellbeing throughout adulthood. Because friendship isn’t just something nice to have. Friendship is part of our health infrastructure.
Ideal for: corporate audiences, women’s conferences, employee resource groups, community organizations, and leadership events.
From Loneliness to Belonging
Why Connection Is a Public Health Issue
Especially since the pandemic, the loneliness epidemic has changed the way we think about health. But loneliness isn’t solved simply by putting more people in a room. We can be surrounded by colleagues, social media followers, friends, family members, and acquaintances and still feel profoundly alone. Lissa explores what creates genuine belonging: psychological safety, shared vulnerability, reciprocity, meaningful participation, healthy boundaries, and the experience of being known and valued. This keynote offers organizations a new way to think about connection—not as a soft perk, but as part of the infrastructure of a healthy workplace and a healthy life.
Ideal for: corporations, HR and people teams, leadership conferences, healthcare systems, universities, and community organizations.
Boundaries That Build Belonging
How to Protect Yourself Without Disconnecting From Other People
We’re often taught that boundaries mean saying no, cutting people off, or protecting ourselves from everyone else’s needs. But healthy boundaries aren’t walls, and they’re not one-sided. Lissa offers a new vision of mutually-negotiated relational boundaries, based on her book Boundaries, Together, as the structure that makes healthy connection possible. Audiences learn how to distinguish boundaries from avoidance, protection from isolation, collaboration from codependence, and discernment from judgment. Rather than teaching people to become more defended, this keynote teaches people how to become more relationally skilled.The goal isn’t disconnection; it’s connection with choice and consent.
Ideal for: corporations, leadership audiences, healthcare organizations, women’s conferences, and organizations working on psychological safety and workplace culture.
From Fawning to Freedom
How to Stop Abandoning Yourself in the Name of Being a Good Person
Many high-functioning people have learned to survive by being agreeable, accommodating, helpful, and endlessly available. They become the person everyone can count on, while quietly abandoning themselves. Lissa explores the trauma response commonly known as “fawning” and how it can show up in friendships, romantic relationships, families, and workplaces. Audiences learn how to recognize the difference between genuine generosity and self-abandonment, how to identify their own needs, and how to set boundaries without losing their capacity for connection. This is not a keynote about becoming selfish. It’s about learning that self-abandonment is not the price of belonging.
Ideal for: women’s leadership events, healthcare, helping professionals, corporate audiences, and trauma-informed organizations.
Discernment Is a Health Skill
How to Know Who and What Is Safe Enough to Trust
We talk constantly about mental health and emotional intelligence. We talk much less about discernment. Who do you trust? When should you stay? When should you leave? When is discomfort a normal part of growth, and when is your nervous system telling you something important? How do you distinguish charisma from character, confidence from competence, and intimacy from enmeshment? Lissa brings her medical, trauma-informed, and relational lens to the often-overlooked skill of discernment. Because healthy relationships don’t require us to trust everyone. They require us to learn who has earned our trust, not in a binary yes/no way, but with tools like the intimacy dial, which can be dialed up or down depending on trustworthy behaviors (or lack thereof.)
Ideal for: leadership, healthcare, women’s conferences, spiritual organizations, wellness communities, and audiences navigating rapid cultural change.
Spirituality Without the Bypass
When Spiritual Growth Becomes a Way of Avoiding Conflict & Trauma Healing
Spirituality can be profoundly healing. But it can also become a sophisticated way of avoiding conflict, grief, trauma, accountability, anger, boundaries, and the messy work of being human. Lissa explores spiritual bypassing and what happens when spiritual beliefs or practices are used to transcend difficult emotions and relational realities rather than metabolize them. She examines teachings such as radical forgiveness, surrender, detachment, “everything happens for a reason,” and the pressure to remain positive or “high vibration,” asking a deceptively simple question, “Does this spiritual teaching help us become more present to reality—or help us escape it?” Lissa offers a trauma-informed framework for spirituality that makes room for mystery, allows us to keep the baby while throwing out the bathwater, and doesn’t require us to abandon discernment, accountability, the full range of emotions, or our embodied human experience.
Ideal for: spiritual and wellness conferences, retreat centers, therapists, coaches, helping professionals, and organizations interested in ethical leadership.
Mind Over Medicine, Reimagined
What We Now Know About the Mind-Body Connection
Lissa’s groundbreaking work in Mind Over Medicine helped bring the mind-body connection into mainstream conversation. Today, she offers an updated perspective informed by decades of research, clinical experience, trauma science, and her work on relational health. The question is no longer simply whether our thoughts affect our bodies. It’s how our beliefs, emotions, nervous systems, relationships, environments, and sense of safety interact with the body’s capacity for healing. Lissa offers audiences a nuanced understanding of mind-body medicine that avoids both extremes- the idea that conventional medicine can fix everything, and the equally problematic idea that people can simply “think themselves well.” The pandemic further divided two camps, the materialist medicine camp and the alternative medicine/ wellness camp. This keynote builds bridges between camps while keeping critical thinking and science at the core.
Ideal for: healthcare conferences, hospitals, integrative medicine organizations, women’s health events, and wellness audiences.
Booking Information
- Based in: West Sonoma County, CA (travels nationally and internationally)
- Fee range: On request
- Travel expenses: Coach airfare or mileage at current government rate, hotel accommodations (typically 1–2 nights depending on schedule), ground transportation, and meals.
- Formats: Keynote, workshop, retreats, in person or virtual.
- CE’s: Available for healthcare audiences
If you’re planning a nursing or healthcare conference, a women’s health conference, nursing or healthcare leadership conference, or retreat, reach out and let’s talk about how Lissa could be the right fit for your event.
Frequently Asked Questions
Check Lissa’s Availability
— barbara@speakwellbeing.com | 503-699-5031, or click here.
Lissa is available for booking through The Speak Well Being Group for mind-body conferences, healthcare and mental health conferences, nursing and healthcare leadership events, hospital wellness events, women’s health conferences, and retreats. You get 28 years of vetting, personal knowledge of Lissa’s work, and someone in your corner from first inquiry through event day.
