#102 - Dr. Lissa Rankin - The Nervous System, Radical Remissions, & The Future Of Healing

Dr. Lissa Rankin confronts the culture of medicine that equates authority with certainty and leaves little room for doubt, humility, or humanity. From working inside a system that demanded speed and emotional detachment to uncovering how chronic stress and relational strain dysregulate the nervous system, she challenges a purely mechanistic view of health. This conversation also dives into radical remissions, the intersection of science and spirit, and the paradox at the heart of healing: the less we try to control it, the more possible it becomes. 

Timestamps:
00:00 Unlearning The Conventional Medical System
02:26 Experiencing A Moral Injury
05:44 Whole Health: Integrating Holistic & Conventional Care
10:20 Why Don't More Doctors Leave The System?
18:24 This Is Why All Doctors Are Mindbody Practitioners
20:50 The Rise Of The Nervous System 
26:29 The Body Isn't The Foundation Of Health
32:06 The Longevity Movement
35:50 The Paradox Of Healing
44:57 Tapping Into Spirit & Higher Powers
48:35 The Six Steps To Healing
57:40 How “You Can Heal Yourself” Can Turn Into Self-Blame
59:26 Exposing Younger Generations To A Whole Health System
1:02:55 Connect With Dr. Lissa Rankin

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Transcript

Dr. Lissa Rankin confronts the culture of medicine that equates authority with certainty and leaves little room for doubt, humility, or humanity. From working inside a system that demanded speed and emotional detachment to uncovering how chronic stress and relational strain dysregulate the nervous system, she challenges a purely mechanistic view of health. This conversation also dives into radical remissions, the intersection of science and spirit, and the paradox at the heart of healing: the less we try to control it, the more possible it becomes. 

Tim Doyle (00:07.633)

How does someone who spent close to two decades in conventional medicine begin to unlearn everything they were taught and unravel all the beliefs they had that they thought were true?

Lissa Rankin (00:19.5)

And it's such a long answer. I actually wrote a book called The Anatomy of a Calling that takes a stab at trying to answer that question. But it's hard because I was very much raised indoctrinated, I will say, into the conventional medical model. My dad was a doctor. I grew up in hospitals. It was the only way I knew how to connect with my father. And then I went to very sort of academic institutions like Duke University and Northwestern. And so.

That's the way, like that is the way. And by the time I was 30, I was a good little soldier. And by the time I was 37, I had left the hospital. And that was just the beginning of deconstructing everything that I had been taught. Well, I won't say everything because I would still absolutely go to the doctor if I got cancer. And if I had an appendicitis, I would go to the ER and hope somebody will take my appendix out. So I'm not in any way anti-medicine and I was, you know,

very much a gung-ho get your COVID vaccine, follow public health guidelines during the pandemic. So it's not like I'm deconstructing everything, but it was just such an incomplete lens on what it takes to heal. unlearning what I had learned and then learning everything I should have been taught in medical school and hadn't been. I have a whole, on my website I have like a.

all the things I wasn't taught in medical school and should have been list because that's taken me now, I mean it's been almost 20 years since I left. So that's been, it took me as long to unlearn as it did to learn.

Tim Doyle (01:55.826)

You experienced what you call a moral injury. How did that play a pivotal role in your rerouting in life?

Lissa Rankin (02:04.734)

Yeah, well, I love the term moral injury. was designed to describe return war veterans who are following orders, or maybe now we could say ICE agents who are following orders. They're doing what they're told, and yet it goes against their conscience. They know that they're doing something wrong. And that's what I felt like. I felt like I'm doing what I was trained to do, and it feels immoral.

to me and largely the reason for that is that when I started my OB-GYN practice I was expected to see 25 patients per day, which is a lot. By the time I quit I was expected to see 40. So I was double booked in 15 minute slots and anybody who knows anything about gynecology or obstetrics knows that you need more than seven and a half minutes to be able to show up for a woman around her most vulnerable parts and.

to ask any questions that actually heal, like what is it gonna take for your body to heal, or what do you need in order to live a life that your body will love? Or even, how's your sex life? Or have you been sexually abused? Like you can't ask questions like that and then be like, have 60 seconds. So, and that's just the beginning. I was absolutely shamed and mocked and ridiculed in my medical training.

for having any empathy. Like if I cried with my patients because they delivered a dead baby. And I had one night where I had four of those, four dead babies in one night. And so, so many of the qualities that we would actually want in doctors, and many of them are qualities that we might consider part of the feminine principle, even though they exist in and should exist in all genders or all sexual identifications.

They literally get beaten out of you. I mean, not quite literally, but I mean, I had criminal abuses against me in my medical training and horrible sexual harassment. And like I said, deep mockery around my empathy. And who wouldn't want an empathic doctor? So part of why I left was I felt like there had been this midwife early in my training that was like, don't ever let them break you. She saw me crying over something tragic that had happened in the hospital.

Lissa Rankin (04:19.916)

And I thought, okay, I'm about to get broken. And that would be an even worse outcome for me than leaving the hospital.

Tim Doyle (04:27.963)

Why do you think there was such mockery?

Lissa Rankin (04:30.786)

Honestly, and I hope things have changed. I mean, this was back in the 90s. Honestly, I think it's that, I mean, I'm an internal family systems practitioner, and most of my professors at that time were men. And I think that's what they do to themselves. I think they mock their own vulnerable parts or their own empathic parts or their own parts that have pain when our patients are suffering.

That's how, like we're taught to sort of like suck it up and be stoic and push it down and be professional. And then if they see somebody else who's maybe doing the more humane thing, it's like they're yelling at themselves.

Tim Doyle (05:14.885)

Yeah, I mean, do, what I like most about your work and what I appreciate the most and you alluded to it already earlier is that it's not a full, you know, like switch at the pendulum or like a total 180 of like, okay, mind, body holistic. It's more of what you call, you know, whole health where obviously it has a holistic foundation and it's rooted in that, but it's not about turning your back on conventional and my,

Lissa Rankin (05:35.15)

Yeah.

Tim Doyle (05:43.813)

conventional and modern medicine, what was it like navigating that path of creating that integrative approach?

Lissa Rankin (05:52.312)

Well, I was really lucky. First of all, I had an amazing mentor. Her name was Rachel Naomi Remen. And she was in the 1960s. She was in the first class of doctors that was taken to Esalen Institute at the height of the human potential movement to see what happens if we take doctors from Stanford and other academic institutions and we expose them to these cutting edge healing and trauma therapy methods and

She never went back to Stanford and she ended up bringing a program called the Healers Art into UCSF medical training and it's now taught at like 77 medical schools in nine countries. So, and she just turned 88 this week. So she was one of those pioneers and I was so lucky to kind of fall under her wing at the, you know, the youngish age of 37 so that I had...

I had really good guidance around that. I still, even still, her generation of mind-body practitioners, it was different. And now there's another generation. The current generation of medical students is primarily female. They are largely much more in touch with those feminine principles. They're more exposed to mind-body practices. The language of trauma therapy is, in that generation, much more.

much less taboo than it was in mine. But many of these things are still cutting edge. Like I'm still learning them. So it's been quite a journey. But I think a lot of what I learned came from having the conventional training. And I worked in places where people were very high risk. I was working with people in the inner city of Chicago. I was working with Somali immigrants, women who had been

victims of female genital mutilation and I was their gynecologist, their obstetrician. And then after I left medicine, I ended up in Marin County, which is for any of you all who know Marin County, it's like the world hub of health nuts. And these people were like eating their raw vegan diets and they had worked out with their personal trainers and their.

Lissa Rankin (08:02.658)

going to their yoga class and they have their meditation practice and they're taking 100 supplements and they've seen the best doctors at Stanford and UCSF. And they were some of the sickest people that I had ever seen. And so a lot of what I learned came from working with that population where I realized that even these people who had all the resources and all the money and access to the best both conventional and alternative medical care, they were not touching sometimes the root causes of their illness which

I have a book coming out in October of 2026 called Relationsick, because part of what I learned from them was that many of these people were in narcissistic relationships with oppressive people in their lives. They were still under the thumb of their oppressive mother, or they were in a toxic marriage, or they were working with a devil wears Prada kind of boss. And their nervous systems couldn't handle that amount of narcissistic abuse.

And of course we know that if we have a chronically dysregulated nervous system, it leads to immune system dysfunction, chronic inflammation, know, chronic repetitive stress responses and the hormonal milieu of stress. And that disables our body's natural repair mechanisms. So many of these people that I was working with, they were relatively young. These were people less than 40 and they had 10 diagnoses that conventional medicine didn't know how to work with.

So I'm really grateful to that patient population for helping me really understand, especially the relational determinants of health. We talk about the social determinants of health, but that's kind of my wheelhouse. That's what I'm really interested in is like loneliness as a public health epidemic and healthy relationships as medicine for the body and dysfunctional or unbalanced relationships as a risk factor.

Tim Doyle (09:54.386)

Why do you think there aren't more Lyserankins? Why aren't there more doctors who go to medical school, get this conventional education, and then are able to say themselves, you know what? This isn't the path.

Lissa Rankin (10:13.198)

You know, I'm embarrassed to say that the real answer from like my guess, I don't know, but my guess is that it is a hugely humbling path. Like I was extremely grandiose at 30. I thought I knew the way, this is how it works. I have figured out life and death. It's an extremely powerful feeling to feel like I understand how to save lives.

And to admit that there's a flaw in my education or that there are holes or that there are things that I can't control or that are uncertain was extremely deflating, to say the least. And then it also required doing the trauma work. Those of us who go to medical school, we didn't become nurses. We don't want to take orders. We want to give them. So there's a lot of unpacking around the relationship to power and control.

to humble yourself as a doctor and say, wait, maybe there are shamans in Peru who know something I don't know. Maybe there are energy healers who have no academic background that know something that I don't know. Maybe there are, you know, indigenous healers from all over the world that are onto something that we haven't figured out and that we actually diminish and look down on. And because that was like my upbringing, it wasn't just that we didn't include

those ways of thinking. It's that they were categorically looked down upon. But again, if you're pushing yourself one up, then everybody who's not you goes one down. And those one up, one down dynamics are exactly the kind of thing I'm writing about in the book Relationsick, right? Because those very power structures at the personal relationship level, and now we're seeing it at the systemic political level.

those oppressive power structures make people sick. But if you're the one in the position of power, it's destabilizing, uncomfortable, and can bring up a lot of our own traumas when we feel uncertain or out of control. Like one of the hardest things for a doctor to say is, don't know.

Tim Doyle (12:30.257)

Yeah. mean, yeah, I had Dr. Ronald Epstein on my show a few months back and his work is all about making sure doctors are becoming more mindful and building up that relationship with self internally so that then they can be more mindful and present with their patients. And what he was saying, he went to Harvard medical school, curiosity,

and exactly what you're saying, I don't know, that's not allowed. You better have an answer for everything. And I'm curious to know, mean, do you feel like when it comes to doctors and mind, body, holistic care, like, do you feel like it's mostly just like truly not believing in that or is it more so of a lack of humility like you were saying?

Lissa Rankin (13:18.574)

Well, I think it's complex. First of all, I want to just highlight what you just said and just second what your other guest said. Like, I don't know in medical school literally got HIV infected bloody scalpels thrown at me. If you were getting pimped in the OR, pimping meaning they're asking you questions about really hard anatomy and stuff like that. And if you don't know the answer, like my medical school professors felt entitled to criminally assault me. Like I literally should have called the police. So you can imagine how

if you go through eight to 12 years of training where you have to know the answer and if you don't know the answer, you damn well better make something up. So to be able to have the humility, like I remember one of my patients, when I was an obstetrician, I had a patient come in who had a rare genetic disease. And like I'd heard of it during my medical training, but I'd never taken care of a patient with this disease. And when I saw it on her chart, I said, hey, would you mind if I just go into my office for a minute and,

like refresh myself on your disease before I see you and she said, nobody ever, no doctor ever has asked me if that's okay. I said, if you'd prefer, I can just sit here and you can fill me in on what I should know about your disease because probably you're more of an expert in your disease than anything in my textbook. And I think for a lot of doctors, like we are pressured to feel like we know everything, we're omnipotent.

We never make mistakes, we're perfectionistic. And there's so much pressure to be that way because if we fuck up, people die. So it is a tremendous responsibility to have somebody's life in your hands. at the same time, the hubris that comes with thinking we're gods, thinking we control life and death, thinking that we're perfect and that we know everything, that hubris is actually what will kill patients. So you know.

I would see it over and over in the operating room because I did a lot of surgery. Like rarely did people get in trouble from saying I'm in over my head, let me call a more advanced surgeon to come in and help me out with this difficult case. And the places where we saw people get in trouble is when you get these cowboys that are in, they're out of their league, they're, you know, they open up somebody's abdomen and it turns out that it's a much more difficult case. instead of.

Lissa Rankin (15:39.246)

calling somebody more experienced, they decide to go for it and they end up cutting into somebody's bowel and the patient gets septic and ends up in the ICU. It's okay to say, I'm in over my head, I don't know how to handle this, I'm not experienced enough here. But we are so, we are thrown in literally as medical students. The first time somebody handed me a scalpel, I've never operated in my life and there's a living human being and I'm supposed to put that scalpel in their belly.

So we learn to have an unrealistic, I don't even quite know the word to use, we have to be confident when we're not. An unreasonable confidence. But that unreasonable confidence is the very thing that prevents us from developing curiosity, from learning, from being humble, from being open. And so I think what

you know, leaving the hospital, and I honestly am not sure I would have followed the path that I did except I left the hospital right after my father died, right after my daughter was born. And I'm not sure honestly if my father had been alive if I would have had the courage to defy him. So in some ways I think we open the minds of doctors one dead doctor at a time. Like we are developing a generational

openness and I see it in the young medical students. They're so different than I was at that age.

Tim Doyle (17:12.785)

That's a fascinating point about your father and it's, yeah, showing, if you're able to show your humanity as a doctor, especially in front of patients, it's so critical. And I think in a weird way, like conventional doctors are still mind-body practitioners because that transfer of energy that they give off to their patients and the way that patients view them.

That is working on the human body in a holistic mind body type of way, rather than simply just, you know, treating the physical body.

Lissa Rankin (17:48.06)

for sure. mean, I really believe, you know, there's probably two and maybe more aspects of the placebo effect. But I believe the strongest part of the placebo effect is the therapeutic relationship. Like, if I have a white coat on and somebody knows, you know, I went to Duke, I went to Northwestern, I am a doctor, and I hand you a sugar pill, and I say, I really sincerely believe this is going to help you. And if I give you an injection,

even more so. And if I give you two injections, even more so. And if I do a fake surgery on you, even more so. But along with that comes, again, that unreasonable confidence and the ritual of care. And different kinds of practitioners have different rituals of care, right? Like doctors have the white coat, we have the stethoscope, we put our hands on somebody's body, we do a physical exam.

Whereas a shaman might have a different ritual of the therapeutic alliance or a trauma therapist might have different rituals. But those rituals of care, especially if we do develop a resonant bond with the patient, if they know that we care, and as you said, the more we are humanized, the more people can feel our empathy, the more we are actually delivering medicine to people in that way.

Tim Doyle (19:13.169)

I'm glad we could lay the groundwork here on the conventional system and your work and experience within that system, because I think it'll make it much more fruitful to understand your work that you do now even more. I mean, you do a lot of great work, a lot of great writing. You've written some incredible books. One of my favorites, Mind Over Medicine. What I find really fascinating though is that as time has gone on and you wrote about

Lissa Rankin (19:25.422)

Lissa Rankin (19:35.406)

you

Tim Doyle (19:41.509)

You believe consciousness over medicine is a more applicable term rather than mind over medicine?

Lissa Rankin (19:45.1)

Yeah. Well, and now I keep changing it. Now I might even say nervous system over medicine, right? Because it is like, it's, it's not the brain.

Tim Doyle (19:56.484)

It seems like nervous system, seems like, I've like picked up on this and like you, I feel like the nervous system three or four years ago, you would have never heard it being talked about.

Lissa Rankin (20:06.528)

No, it's true, I the field of traumatology is changing so much, but consciousness and the nervous system are so linked. I really believe the nervous system is this incredibly finely tuned organism that is so far beyond our brains, our skulls, and it goes beyond even the vagus nerve or our peripheral nerves.

Tim Doyle (20:14.31)

Mm-hmm.

Lissa Rankin (20:36.27)

in contact with every single part of the physical body. And because our consciousness is so linked to the nervous system, that's why mind-body isn't even right, and mind-body-spirit isn't even right. It's like they're so interwoven you can't separate them. But what we know is that when we do the work,

to develop our consciousness, if you want to say it that way, and that's not quite right. But let's just say we do the work to calm our nervous systems through mindfulness practice, through meditation, through trauma healing, through somatic embodiment awareness, movement practices, whatever, yoga tai chi, any number of walking in nature, kinds of different ways that we can.

develop consciousness, then the more we can work to be able to be less instantly reactive without spiritual bypassing, right? Without bypassing our actual experience, the more resilient the nervous system becomes, more, yeah, the more spacious and the more capacity we have to tolerate the human experience, which is hard.

in a way that the body can handle. That's a long-winded way of agreeing with you.

Tim Doyle (22:09.421)

No, to bring another term that I've heard you use a lot into the equation here, what do we need to know about the relationship between the conscious mind and what you call the lizard brain?

Lissa Rankin (22:24.622)

Well, again, all of this is part of the nervous system. Like the lizard brain basically refers to the more primal part of our nervous system, particularly the amygdala, which is where we experience and process fear. And, you know, when we are operating from a system of fear-based consciousness, then we are...

And when I say fear-based consciousness, in the internal family systems language, we'd be talking about protector parts, parts that are anticipating fear, that are afraid of things that may never happen. Right? Because we certainly never want to demonize fear. if you're, you know, people who are born with something wrong with their brain and they don't feel fear, they don't live because they just walk in front of a bus. They're not afraid of walking into a street. So fear is what keeps us safe, and we want to pay attention to it.

get the intuition that comes from fear as well, but very frequently our manager parts, our protector parts are anticipating fearful outcomes that may or may not ever happen. And when we're constantly operating in this anxiety-driven consciousness, we're catastrophizing the future, which it's hard not to watch the news and feel that way right now. I certainly do it. I certainly have parts that are catastrophizing.

But when we do that, are constantly activating the hypothalamus, which is activating the pituitary gland, which is in communication with the adrenal glands, which are spitting out cortisol and epinephrine and filling our body with stress hormones. And that stress hormone milieu will impact the nervous system, the immune system, the chronic inflammatory system, and again, disable the body's natural self-healing mechanism. So all of that is very related to our

physical bodies. I also, you know, I say that with the awareness, having written a book called The Fear Cure many years ago. We also have to comfort the parts of us that are terrified. We have to show up with empathy and nurturance for the parts that are afraid. Maybe they're legitimately afraid because of something that's happening right now, but maybe it's reactivating parts of us that were very young.

Lissa Rankin (24:46.104)

that were very frightened, that were not comforted when we were little, that were not taught to know how to process intense feelings like fear or shame or rage. And I think that's the sensitive part of developing our consciousness, but also re-parenting the younger parts of us that maybe didn't really learn how to be with those kinds of intense emotions, so that we can calm our nervous system, so that we can develop our consciousness.

so that we can have healthier bodies and minds and lives.

Tim Doyle (25:19.025)

The body isn't the foundation of your health. The body is the physical manifestation of the sum of your life experiences.

Lissa Rankin (25:26.574)

That's from my Novr medicine. Yeah, that was a big epiphany for me was like the body is a byproduct like I kind of thought and the conventional medical model is like do the right thing right like mine According to that model the original model that I was trained in the Marin County patients should have been the healthiest people on the planet Right there. They're following their doctor's orders. They're having a perfect diet. They're not

You know, they're not exposing themselves to any toxins. They've brought in an environmental consultant to get the mold out of their kitchen. Like, they've literally addressed all of the external aspects of health and healing, and they're still sick. And when I say the body is the physical manifestation of the sum of your life's experiences, what I mean is like, I could see in their medical chart,

what was actually happening in their lives. Because they didn't look the way they were supposed to look. It was like, everything that was out of alignment in their life, outside of what we would consider traditional health behaviors, was screaming through their bodies. And when I interviewed these people, I ended up changing my intake form. I left the conventional model and I was spending an hour with people which...

I didn't love because it meant they were cash pay. In order to get an hour, I was working with a more elite population, which my public health and health equity parts didn't like doing. But the advantage is I got a whole hour with people, and I got to ask all of the questions. And I would discover things about these people. Their relationships were in a shambles. They were like, I never went to art school. Instead, I did what my father wanted me to do. I'm not living.

I'm not singing the song that's still unsung within me. I'm pretzeled into a shape that is trying to please everybody. I'm fawning the 10 people in my life that are putting pressure on me from all sides. I am being dishonest with myself and everybody else about what's actually important to me, what my priorities are, what my politics are, what my values are, or even who I am.

Lissa Rankin (27:47.902)

And no wonder the body is a mess. And so part of what working with these patients taught me was, you know, I started just asking them, this is where I developed the whole health care and that I teach about in Mind Over Medicine and in the Whole Health Medicine Institute training program that I've run for doctors, is like all of the other things that are scientifically proven to impact your health, not just those healthy behaviors.

but your relationships, your work and life purpose, your creativity, your spirituality, your sexuality, your mental health, your physical environment, the home in which you live, your community connections. All of these things are, I think, equally, if not more important. And there's evidence to show that. I tell the story in Mind Over Medicine of the people of Roseto, Pennsylvania, where this was a community of Italian immigrants that

kind of moved their little Italian village into a small, small rocky hill town in Rosetta, Pennsylvania. A visiting cardiologist came by and was at the local pub talking to the local doctor who said, yeah, I don't know what's with these people of Rosetta, but they half the rate of heart disease of everybody else and they don't seem to die of anything illness related. They just kind of die of old age. And this guy was curious and ended up going through the death records and sure enough they had

half the rate of heart disease. But they thought, well, maybe it's what they eat, and they're eating meatballs fried in lard, because they can't afford the olive oil that they used in Italy. They're eating pizza and pasta. They're drinking like a bottle of red wine. They're smoking cigarettes and cigars. Like, they were doing all the things that should have given them heart disease. And long story short, the researchers came in and concluded that the reason these people were so healthy was because nobody was ever lonely.

They worked in the rock quarry and the blouse factory. These were hardworking immigrants, but every day when they came home from work, they met in the streets. They had communal meals. The elders were taking care of the children, and people were playing dominoes and sitting around having a glass of wine and taking care of one another. Nobody was on welfare. Everybody came together at the local church for their community celebrations.

Lissa Rankin (30:09.792)

And people were looking out for each other. And as soon as that community started disbanding, the children grew up, they wanted to move to the suburbs and have fences and pools, then that same population of people developed the same rate of heart disease that the rest of the country had. And at the time, it was really at its peak. And I thought, it's such an inspiring but also sad story. We're heartbroken. We're lonely. And I think since the pandemic, that's

become even more so in a way. People have become frightened of one another. Like, we were a threat to infectious disease. So that's still sort of the cutting edge of my interest now is those relational aspects of healing.

Tim Doyle (30:55.855)

And I think it further shows that you can't purely see health and the body in a mechanistic way. And that's why I find the longevity community so fascinating and seeing how that plays out because obviously a lot of new science, new technology, reversing your biological age, which is obviously interesting to see.

Lissa Rankin (31:08.984)

Yeah.

Tim Doyle (31:23.301)

but it also feels like just largely mechanistic and, you know, not integrating with these more holistic types of things.

Lissa Rankin (31:32.078)

Well, and it's mechanistic and it's also, again, there's a bit of hubris and all that. you know, it's like, no, we're not going to live forever. So I'm much more interested in how can I live, how can I die all the way spent? Right? Like how can I check as many boxes of my authenticity, in actual, in actuality with acknowledgement of my privilege around that, right? Like not everybody gets.

Tim Doyle (31:36.703)

Yeah, yes, 100%.

Lissa Rankin (31:59.598)

to check things off of their bucket list before they die. But when I think about aging, because I'm getting older now, I'm not thinking, how can I live to be 140? I'm thinking, how can I transition into being a wise elder, into being a wisdom keeper, into being a sage, into being a support person for the younger generations, into having pride in my life experience and

instead of fearing death or living as if there's some magical, magical thinking way that I'm going to somehow escape it through mechanistic perfectionism of the human body. Yeah, I'm not really so much thinking about that these days. I'm thinking much more about meaning, about purpose, about legacy, about relationships, about

the soul nourishment of knowing that I'm smack dab in the center of my purpose and having secure attachments with people who love me and people who I love and knowing who my inner circle is and my chosen family and prioritizing that over mechanistic goals, right? Because again, it's so reductionistic.

Like I look at some of these people that are in the news that are focusing on their longevity, and my guess is their relationships are shit. Because if you're spending that much time trying to live forever, you're probably ignoring your wife and neglecting your children, and your priorities are all out of whack.

Tim Doyle (33:41.476)

Yeah, there is a...

Obsessiveness around it and I I do I find it very fascinating. I think it's a very it's a very fascinating topic and It's very cool to see the types of therapies that are in treatments that are coming out of it But I completely agree with you and the reason why I brought it up is that I feel like it's a very mechanistic approach to Health and viewing yourself and you could if we're gonna bring the spirit component into it and I'm not

Lissa Rankin (33:49.056)

It is fascinating.

Tim Doyle (34:14.585)

necessarily saying this, but you could make the case of like, God, higher power, whatever somebody's belief system is, it'd be like, is this what's intended for you? Or like, are you playing a little bit of a higher power in a type of way where you're trying to reshape the way that humanity sort of goes through this human experience? And I want to get deeper into healing.

Lissa Rankin (34:31.758)

Yeah.

Tim Doyle (34:43.343)

and people who have physical ailments and self-healing. I've healed from chronic pain in a very holistic mind-body way five years ago. I see healing as being a very paradoxical thing in a way where you can't push for it to happen or you can't do it out of ambition. It's more so of a receiving act. What are your thoughts on that?

Lissa Rankin (35:12.108)

No, I'm really glad you brought that up because what I was wanting to say when we were talking about the longevity piece is that there's a big difference between healing and controlling. And when we start looking at these really reductionistic, mechanistic ways of approaching the body, usually they are about control. And again, that's what I was taught in my medical training. This is how you control the human body.

And everything that I learned about healing since, and I spent 10 years working with shamans in Peru and Qigong masters from China and kahunas in Hawaii and energy healers all over the world and indigenous healers from many traditions and trauma therapists at the cutting edge. And so much of what I learned from them was like, they were not in control of what was happening. Some of them were too out of control, in my opinion. You know, I don't think

It should just be a free for all in the name of healing the way it's sometimes happening with people who are abusing the therapeutic relationship, taking advantage of people when they're under the influence of psychedelics or things like that. And I have a lot of strong opinions about that that I wrote about in my book, Sacred Medicine. But you can see if there's two sides, if there's two ends of the spectrum, one of which is rigid control. And I would say a lot of the conventional medicine is in that realm.

And also a lot of the people in Marin County who were in this, you know, extreme wellness culture where once again they are rigidly trying to control all their numbers. They're trying to control their diet. They're trying to control their weight. Everything is perfectionistically being controlled. And healing is this mystery, right? And it's this, as you said, so often the...

miraculous stories of spontaneous remission and things like that. My partner Jeff Redeker wrote a book called Cured, where he spent 17 years studying people who were cured from quote unquote incurable illnesses. And so many of those stories, when you look at them scientifically, they are mysteries. And when you ask them what do they ascribe their unexpected cure to, it is this place of surrender. They're not in control. Many of them expected to die.

Lissa Rankin (37:33.454)

They made peace with dying. They made peace with their families. They were ready to die and then they just didn't. And I think of the story of Stomatosmaritis. He's one of the mystery stories in the medical literature of this Greek American man who was in his 50s. He was diagnosed with end stage lung cancer. And he went to his wife. They wanted to give him treatment but they told him it would be only palliative.

And he decided, you know, I don't want to spend all that money. I might as well just take my wife and go back to Icaria, the Greek island where I grew up, to be with my family, to be with my culture, to go back to my way of life. If I'm going to die anyway, I want my wife to have the support of all of my family and friends. so they moved back to Icaria, and he's working in the garden. And there's an old vineyard, and he's tending the vineyards. He's not expecting that he's going to live long enough to get the vegetables out of the garden.

or to be able to make a bottle of wine out of the vineyards. But he is walking. It's a blue zone, yeah. So anyway, long story short, it's worth hearing the whole story, but depending on the records, he died either at 98 or 103, and he went back 25 years after he was diagnosed in his 50s to find the doctors who had told him he was gonna die within a year, and they were all dead.

Tim Doyle (38:36.304)

That's a blue zone as well, right? Is it? Yeah.

Lissa Rankin (39:01.07)

So I love those Blue Zone stories. But again, that was a, he wasn't controlling his health. He wasn't controlling his diagnosis. He was surrendered to the mystery and surrounded by love and everybody was coming and playing games with him and telling him stories and appreciating that he had come back and he was walking and he's working in the garden and he's eating from the land and he's going to services at his church and he just.

forgot to die. There was a New York Times article about him called The Man Who Forgot to Die. so I think there's finding that place, you know, in the original six steps to healing yourself and mind over medicine. The last one, it was basically like, here's the five things you can do to try to control your health and optimize your health outcome. And then step six was, you know, surrender attachment to outcomes. Like you can actually stress your nervous system even more from the

striving, right? And then when I rewrote the book in 2020, I had been talking to patients of mine who had been working with this method, and they were like, Dr. Rankin, you don't have to wait until the end to let go. You can set your intention. In the very beginning, you can believe that healing is possible, and you can let go right after and trust the mystery and continue to do the things that can optimize your health. So in the

In the revised edition, surrender was step two. And they can be all happening at once. There's not really an order, but I think that paradoxical relationship between trying to get better and letting go and accepting what's happening and releasing some of that striving energy. And I think that's true not just for health. I mean, even just me trying to publish my first book, every effort that I made at trying to get published.

was counterproductive and it was the sort of sobbing on my knees, burning the manuscript on the beach, surrendering to whatever higher power. Like, if this is what I'm supposed to do, help me and if not, stop me. Yeah, that certainly has been a huge part of my spiritual life is letting go of the rigid control of my childhood and my medical education to open space for

Lissa Rankin (41:28.152)

for mystery.

Tim Doyle (41:30.552)

And if you don't open that space for mystery, if you try to control the healing process, it can be a very stress inducing process then.

Lissa Rankin (41:38.69)

Well, that's what I'm saying. The very energy, there's a woman, Tosha Silver, who has a quote that I love. She said, the very energy of grasping for the feather pushes it away. Right? It's like you're grabbing, and the more you're grabbing, the more elusive it becomes. And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't effort to try to get the things that we want, to try to bring about the outcomes that we desire. But that's why I'm like,

strongly averse to like the secret manifestation stuff. It's such not a true story to say that all you have to do is believe, believe hard enough and strive more and make it happen. It's like that make it happen energy is really, really helpful for some things and for other things, it's absolutely counterproductive. So finding that, that yin yan, that Taoist kind of

balance between the efforting and the letting go. Because I also have seen some people who let go too much. know, it's like they come to me, I run a mentoring program and do some one-on-one work and some internal family systems work with people and they come to me with this dream, right? Here's this thing that I want to create in my life and I'm like, have you told anybody? Have you put up a website? Have you sent out an email saying...

Can anybody help me with this? They're like, no, I'm sitting here waiting. I'm surrendered to what wants to happen. I'm like, well, it might help to actually tell the humans, you know?

Tim Doyle (43:14.864)

Yeah, that reminds me of, I know it from the movie Pursuit of Happiness, but it's like the fable of the person is drowning in the ocean, boat goes by, you'd like, oh, do need me to help you? It's like, no, God will save me. Another boat comes by, you need me to help you? No, God will save me. The guy drowns, goes to heaven. He's like, God, why didn't you save me? And he's like, well, I sent you two boats. And it's like being able to, yeah, it's a dance in a way, knowing when to push.

Lissa Rankin (43:34.734)

Where'd you go?

Tim Doyle (43:44.559)

knowing when to sit down. I think that's where the spirit component comes into it as well, where, and it's really fascinating. I'm assuming you saw that James Van Der Beek just died from cancer. And I find it, yeah, I mean, I saw one clip of him in an interview. I don't know when it was, but he had already been diagnosed with cancer and he was going through chemo and everything.

Lissa Rankin (43:49.997)

Yeah.

Lissa Rankin (43:58.54)

Yes, I did. I loved Jocelyn Crete.

Tim Doyle (44:11.952)

And he said cancer is really the thing that opened him up to God and that higher power. And he really hadn't had that before. And I thought it was so fascinating because I think it feel like being opened up to spirit isn't, it's not a building up effect, but it's more of a breaking down.

Lissa Rankin (44:16.648)

Yeah.

Lissa Rankin (44:28.664)

Yeah, for sure. I think illness for many people is not just a wake up call, but it's a humbling of there are things we can't control. There are things we're not in control of. And that is, again, just like me being a doctor and having that humble fall from the grace of my hubris, right? Or fall from my hubris into grace or whatever you want to say. I think when people get sick, it's, wow, I'm not in control of this.

And that can be both terrifying and a relief in a way that there are things that we're not in control of. And I think that's, I don't know, I saw people just become so bizarre during the pandemic. It was like all these conspiracy theories and things. And I was like, why, why are people believing these batshit things? But I realized that for people that have trauma around being out of control, things being uncertain,

it maybe it felt safer to believe something completely outrageous that made them feel like I know this is how it's working. This is what's certain. Even if it's batshit, that's less scary to believe this inane conspiracy theory than to be like I have no idea what's happening. Nobody has any idea what's happening. The public health officials have no idea what's happening. The government officials have no idea what's happening.

So in the void of knowing is terror and if we're willing to actually sit in the void of the not knowing, that's also, I honestly believe that's where wisdom comes and where things that maybe are at the verge of the unknown, if we're humble and open and curious, then maybe if we're lucky,

and we don't have too much hubris and too much certainty, then maybe things that are in the realm of the unknown can cross the veil. And if we're on the other side of it and we're not so guarded, then maybe we can be a transmitter of the things that cross from the unknown to the known. And that's a place that I've felt really lucky to get to bear witness to others.

Lissa Rankin (46:54.56)

And often it's sick people that are there. Often it's dying people that are there. They're at the veil. And it can be a beautiful place if we can navigate the fear of the unknown.

Tim Doyle (47:07.536)

And what I think is great about your work is showing people that you don't have to, you can give up control, but that can also mean that it's empowering you. Like just because you don't have control can still mean that you have autonomy and you're empowered. And a crucial part of that is your six steps to healing. Can you give a overview of what that is?

Lissa Rankin (47:30.723)

Hmm.

Yeah, and again, I rewrote them. Thanks for saying that. And I always feel like it's so nuanced. I also want to say, don't let somebody else control you, right? Letting go of control, surrender in ourselves is very different than surrendering to a cult leader or surrendering to a madman in politics or letting somebody else control you is very different than.

Now I think of it as surrendering to self-energy, surrendering to the center of one's being, to the core divine spark that animates us all, right? It's not some man in the sky with a long beard, that's, I don't really believe in that, but I do believe that, you know, in all the mystical traditions of all of the religions have some iteration of the Christ consciousness, the Buddha nature, the center of our love.

in internal family systems, we call it self with a capital S. And I, for many years before I ever heard of internal family systems, called it my inner pilot light. And so, yeah, the original six steps have changed, so I'll give you the ones from 2020, which is basically you have to start by believing that healing is possible. And that's what's so hard about the way doctors talk to patients, is if a doctor comes to you and says,

you have this diagnosis, you have three months to live, this is your prognosis, that is medical hexing. Because nobody knows the future. Nobody knows what's gonna happen to any one individual. That may be a statistically accurate assessment, but having studied and worked with people who have had radical remissions now for almost 20 years of my life, like nobody knows which one.

Lissa Rankin (49:23.726)

Which person who's told they have three months to live is going to be in Icaria at 103? So believe it. So what I tell doctors is, you know, a good way to give bad news. If you're going to give people bad news, if there's even one case study of somebody who had a mysterious remission from that disease, like give them the case study along with the statistic. If you feel like you must give them statistics. But in general, I don't like to give people statistics because

Tim Doyle (49:28.708)

Ha

Lissa Rankin (49:52.394)

No individual is a statistic, you know? So holding out that little belief, and I'm not talking about irrational false beliefs or magical thinking. It's like we can be realistic and practical and we can also hold open the space that healing is possible, even if cure isn't. And that's a whole separate thing is the difference between healing and curing. And then step two is sort of.

Tim Doyle (49:55.312)

Mm-hmm.

Lissa Rankin (50:20.33)

having set this intention or this belief, surrendering to this part of ourselves that is gonna guide the journey. This part that's not a part, the self, God, whatever you wanna call it. That there is intuition, there is guidance, there are ways, and that includes inner and outer. Step three is having the right support team, making sure...

And again, these have gotten moved around. There's no real order to them. But having the right support team is absolutely crucial. So we need to trust the self inside of us. And we also need to have a circle of people that we trust on the outside of us, whether they're doctors or trauma therapists or alternative medicine practitioners or just people in our community. I mean, we know from good science that people have nine or more support people when they're on a healing journey.

Their outcomes are significantly different than people that have very few or nobody on their on their team So having that support network and then step four is diagnosing the root cause of your illness Which is you know sort of the the psychological roots the trauma based roots Sometimes their lifestyle roots like it's my marriage. That's the problem It's my my toxic mother-in-law that's living in the house and coercively controlling me

And so there's a whole process in mind over medicine of how to diagnose the root causes of illness, which are different than, you know, COVID is caused by the coronavirus. That is a different kind of diagnosis. But why does one person die of the coronavirus and another person doesn't? You know, and that's where we get into sort of the germ theory versus terrain theory. you know, the old school idea of terrain theory has been debunked, but I still believe that the

that there is both, that we have both a resilient nervous system, a resilient immune system, a body that's capable of self-repair, and the more we're able to keep our body in that state, the more we're able to fight off a germ, for example. And then step five is what we call writing the prescription for yourself. So this is basically an intuitively guided treatment plan that may include

Lissa Rankin (52:40.226)

conventional medicine and trauma therapy and relational healing and improving your diet and having more nutrient density in your diet or whatever. And then I added a new step six because I sort of combined a couple others and added a step six because after working one-on-one with people, I didn't realize that part of what I was doing with them is that I was addressing the resistance right up front.

But when I started working in groups and I had 100 sick people in a room at a retreat center, and people would go through to step five, and I'd say, okay, now let's, obviously there's no guarantees, but let's say, you you're in a, you have a guarantee that if you did everything on this list, you'd be cured. How many of you are gonna go home and do it? And like 50 % of the people would raise their hand. And I'd be like, hey, what's going on? I wanna hear from the rest of you. And they would say things like, but wait.

if I get cured, then I'm not gonna get my disability check and I hated my job or, but wait, my husband beat me until I got sick and now if I don't have that excuse or whatever, like they basically started telling me about, you know, I hate the term secondary gain, but they were actually, there were benefits that they were getting and, and you know, when we have trauma, we have a crisis of imagination.

I was like, okay, wait, we need to first of all address the parts that are scared, the parts that are getting some benefit from the illness, but also get creative. Well, what if you could get away from that abusive husband instead of needing to be sick in order not to get beaten? Or what if you don't need that disability check because there's actually another job that you love that you don't need to get the disability check for. Maybe there's another way.

to get rid of your abusive mother-in-law rather than needing to have migraines. So working with people around, and this is where IFS comes in so helpful, it's like we almost always, and we all know this from New Year's resolutions, we have parts that want the good thing. They want us to get better, they want us to quit our bad habits, they want us to lose weight, they want us to be successful, they want us to fulfill our dreams, and then we have other parts that are like, no freaking way.

Lissa Rankin (55:04.383)

And so step six is treating the resistant parts, like not in a bullying way. We can't override those parts. We need to compassionately get to know and witness and help support using things like IFS, the parts that don't want to get better. And why? And often when we work with parts that don't want to get better, life has been hard.

And even things like cancer, for some people, if they're really honest, they're like, this is a more socially acceptable way to go than suicide. So we have to address the mental health issues, we have to address the lifestyle, the loneliness, the relational issues to help people want to live their life. And that's not saying that everybody who's not getting better has some unconscious suicidal ideation, but to have...

Tim Doyle (55:38.937)

Hmm.

Lissa Rankin (56:00.184)

support in, that's why I love the question, what would it take to live a life your body would love? Just to be able to help people vision a life worth getting better for. And then being creative about problem solving solutions. And I recognize again, are things that there's no simple solution for when I say that. Some people,

really are suffering and there aren't creative solutions. So I'm aware of that too.

Tim Doyle (56:32.281)

That is an interesting component to have some type of accepted ailment that makes you more comfortable with being less than you truly can be. And I feel like healing from that perspective can be a very fearful process because when that unwell identity becomes so deeply ingrained within us, like getting better actually in a way.

Lissa Rankin (56:45.016)

Yeah.

Tim Doyle (57:01.903)

can feel bad and...

What I also find really interesting is that healing can obviously be a very empowering thing where, you know, if you tell somebody, Hey, you can heal yourself. That can be very encouraging and inspiring, but I think you can also get into the narrative of thinking the inverse where it's like, okay, if you're telling me I can heal myself, then that also means

Lissa Rankin (57:18.69)

Yeah.

Tim Doyle (57:35.023)

Okay, if I don't heal myself, then that means I'm the one who's keeping myself stuck.

Lissa Rankin (57:39.158)

Absolutely. That's why I'm not a fan of the law of attraction, right? It's like, if you can manifest your cure, then you're also responsible for your cure. If you're in control of your cure, then it's your fault if you're not getting cured. And that's why I write, most of what I write is so long, because it doesn't sound bite well. To be able to explain all the nuance in that, it's like, you're responsible to your illness, but not for your illness.

You can be empowered around your healing journey and you're not in control of it. In sacred medicine, I have a lot of what I call the paradoxes of healing. And those are some of those paradoxes.

Tim Doyle (58:17.849)

You've talked about how you feel like there's a new age of doctors who are coming in within the field who are very in tune with this more holistic mind body path and integrating it with conventional care. I'm curious on the individual side now of, okay, the medical system, let's say it's improved. How do individuals on a personal level get more in tune with this type of work? And where I want to bring that to is

Okay, how do we bring this to newer generations, especially younger generations? I mean, what do you think if we're talking, if we're taking like a macro level view, like bringing this type of mind, body holistic approach and preaching this at a young age when kids are in their most developmental years, what is the impact of that?

Lissa Rankin (59:10.19)

Well, I keep thinking I need to write a children's book because, you know, they say like so much of like our brains are sponges until about the age of five or six. We are literally just downloading what we're told. So if what you're told is here's a pill, this will cure you. Then that's what you will unless you deconstruct your indoctrination. That's what people will believe. So I'm like, wow, we need to be telling our kids here's a pill that's going to help you feel better.

while your body heals itself. Or like bringing in some of that nuance so that we are literally raising our children to realize like the body, like even when you break a bone, unless someone's doing surgery and gluing and pinning the bone back together, like even then the bone has to restitch itself. Like we are, that is so often what's happening when we're getting medical treatment is we are supporting the body. We are.

supporting the body to do, to be able to do what the body knows how to do on its own. We fight cancer cells every day. We fight off infections every day. And I have so much to say and I'm looking at the time. I'm like, I can't actually answer that question in the amount of time because I have a hard stop today. But yeah, I love being able to talk to young people like you and some of the people in your audiences so that we can get some of the messaging of Mind Over Medicine into our young people and

hopefully into their children so that we're bringing forward this paradigm shift into different generations. And I think it is possible as the older generations are passing. When I was in medical training, there was very much of a generation gap. The older generation absolutely wanted to be told what to do by their doctor.

They wanted to be given an order and then they had the option of either being a compliant patient who follows the order or a non-compliant patient who rebels. And the younger generations, I hope they go in breaking down those power hierarchies between doctors and patients, showing up as a partner in their own healthcare, taking responsibility for what you can take responsibility for, but also knowing you're not in control and neither is your doctor.

Lissa Rankin (01:01:32.552)

and being an empowered teammate with the people that you have the power to invite into your team and to fire the people that are not on board for that. So I wish everybody luck around that.

Tim Doyle (01:01:49.399)

It's been great talking with you today. Where can people go to learn more about you, your work, anything else you'd like to share?

Lissa Rankin (01:01:56.398)

Well, my main website is my name lissarenkin.com l-i-s-s-a-r-a-n-k-i-n and I also have a sub stack lissarenkinmd.substack.com and I'm on socials at lissarenkin. So yeah, I'd love to I'd love to be in touch with y'all

Tim Doyle (01:02:14.127)

Awesome, great talking with you today.

Lissa Rankin (01:02:15.586)

Yeah, thank you so much, Tim.