Physician Lissa Rankin says trauma doesn’t just live in the mind; it can trigger measurable physical disease, from autoimmune conditions to chronic illness that conventional medicine can’t explain. But her most provocative claim is the reverse: that healing the nervous system may be the missing piece in reversing illnesses that have resisted every other treatment.
Dr. Rankin, a physician and author of Sacred Medicine and the New York Times bestseller Mind Over Medicine, has spent years studying the link between the nervous system and self-healing, including polyvagal theory and the ventral vagal branch of the vagus nerve. In this conversation with Tami Simon, she widens the definition of trauma well beyond childhood wounds to include systemic racism, environmental toxins, and the everyday stress of simply living in the world today.
In this conversation, Tami and Lissa explore:
- Why Dr. Rankin believes trauma and chronic illness are intrinsically connected
- How polyvagal theory and the vagus nerve point to a physical mechanism for healing
- Why “developmental trauma” can affect even people who had privileged childhoods
- How collective traumas — like systemic racism and white-body supremacy — show up in the body
- Why treating trauma isn’t a guarantee of cure, but can still open the door to real healing
This episode is for anyone who has tried everything to heal a chronic or life-threatening illness and wants to understand what role the nervous system might play.
Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Lissa Rankin, “Is There a Holy Grail of Healing?”
