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. As someone who was taking seven drugs for a variety of medical ailments by the time she was 33, and as someone who had managed to get off all of them after leaving the hospital, she began to question everything she had been so certain of after studying in the ivory towers of her medical training at Duke University, the University of South Florida, and Northwestern University. No matter what path she explored regarding the next health fad du jour, all roads continued to take her to the same disruptive and unconventional conclusion: When other treatments fail to help, assume the patient needs trauma treatment.

Because old school psychoanalysis (talk therapy) does not effectively treat trauma, 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 Asha Clinton, Ph.D.’s Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT,) Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.’s Internal Family Systems (IFS), Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing, and Gary Craig's Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), among others. 

She is currently co-writing a book about Advanced Integrative Therapy with AIT founder Asha Clinton and has been co-teaching with IFS founder Richard Schwartz about IFS as Medical Treatment.

For over a decade now, Lissa has been a staunch and vocal public advocate for the importance of looking beyond only drugs, surgeries, or even food, exercise, meditation, alternative health, and good health habits when it comes to treating recalcitrant physical and mental illnesses. She took the internet by storm with her 2011 TEDx talk "The Shocking Truth About Your Health," which has been viewed 2.5 million times. Her 2012 TEDx talk "Is There Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself?" also got 2.5 million views. She debuted these ideas in 2013 with Mind Over Medicine, which was made into a successful National Public Television special Heal Yourself: Mind Over Medicine. Her next book, The Fear Cure, was also made into a National Public Television special, also titled The Fear Cure.

Because Lissa had closed her integrative medical practice in 2010 to focus on her role in educating the public about the ways in which doctors don't typically support optimal patient wellbeing, demand among patients was rising for doctors who share Lissa's medical point of view and style of practice. To train medical doctors and therapists about what she had learned, Lissa founded the Whole Health Medicine Institute in 2012, a hybrid in-person/ online learning program that includes a team of luminary faculty physicians, therapists, and scientists and involves trauma healing for the students themselves, because so many health care providers are trauma survivors themselves.

In 2014, Lissa became interested in addressing the trauma of loneliness as a public health issue in collaboration with Kitchen Table Wisdom author and The Healer's Art founder Rachel Naomi Remen, MD. In 2016, she delivered another TEDx talk about the health impacts of loneliness- "The #1 Public Health Issue Your Doctor Isn't Talking About." But after it got a lukewarm response (160,000 views), she realized that people felt shame about admitting their loneliness. Lissa began scheming with Dr. Remen (and Dr. Remen was scheming with her former student Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD) about how to address this issue at the level of public health.