 |
Owning HER Health podcastAuthor: Dr Lisa Holland PT, WHC, C-IAYT, CBP
Lissette Alvarez Holland (aka Dr. Lisa,) has been helping women enjoy the human experience of their curvier hustle and divine design for over a decade. This show features women growing a creative careers fueled by professional significance and a family-friendly lifestyle. Dr. Lisa offers her wisdom on the body, mind, soul and purposeful experience of being a woman and helps listeners get in touch with other great minds through the lost art of female conversation and community. Language: aa Genres: Alternative Health, Health & Fitness, Religion & Spirituality, Spirituality Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
Listen Now...
Allow Me To Reintroduce Myself
Episode 99
Wednesday, 1 April, 2026
Show Transcript: Approx 25 Min Total Episode. Watch on You Tube Lissette Holland Hey, hey, hey, Dr. Lisa here. So excited. After a two-year hiatus, for those of you who are new to owning her health, thank you very much for being here. Those of you who are not new and carrying over and watching this again, it's been two years, actually two and a half years. for this owning, you know, for my Owning Her Health podcast. And I wanted to come out today. This is a very intentional day, March 25th, 2026. I wanted to record it live because that's always when my energy, that's the best way for me to record these podcasts, the interactions, the conversations. So why are we returning now? Well, I wanted to one, reintroduce myself in this and explain that. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm a former clinician and I kind of came on the scene as the belly guru, but really through my mentoring, the belly guru was fairly local. It was a radical at the time 2005 coming in with a direct access boutique practice by by I wasn't even a doctor of physical therapy at that point. It was just a regular licensed physical therapist because the doctor didn't even come in till about 2000. We did not bring up the profession to a doctorate I think till about 2010 nine somewhere in there and then I did, I upgraded and went back to school and filled in all the gaps. But prior to that I came into the world of allied health through athletic training. (02:17.998) BLue Ocean Markets My undergrad was in that I have a bachelor's in that sports medicine was working with Division one athletes, semi professional high performance work, a good 10 years in New York City orthopedics worked for top hospitals Mount Sinai, Saint Luke's Roosevelt. I did the gamut of you know, pediatric, through geriatric, through my career. And when I saw what was going on with the economics up in New York, I decided to move out. And my intention was to move to a direct access state, which means that I did not need a doctor's prescription before I could do my practice, before I could use my licensure, which is how it should be. Which is how community health should be. And so I was very intent in finding a direct access state and North Carolina was one of them. And so we moved down to the Charlotte Metro area in 2004, we opened up the Belly Guru in 2005. It was meant to take a 180 degree pivot into women's health because of my own experience despite all I knew and all my awards and my top recommendations of by everybody I worked with and all of my good accolades and you know I went through maternity very naive and I realized the stuff my mother had been going through at the time. I didn't know this, but by the time I actually opened up a radical ( for the Charlotte Market of 2005) integrative community-based, physical therapy office, under a theme of yoga therapy. I knew I was in the Bible, but I did not realize that the second top banking town in America was so behind the number one banking town in terms of thinking of yoga as like a demonic kind of thing. So that was an interesting know your audience moment, but I was naive and I'm glad I was because I didn't realize how revolutionary I was. It ended up me being 10 years in direct access cash-based wellness practice, integrative, making myself the gatekeeper, really flattening the hierarchy of medicine and taking it into a horizontal with the other professions that I brought into my center. (04:42.504) I did not know that I couldn't do it. And therefore I could. And so I became a mentor, a peer mentor, quite organically when everyone else started waking up to the fact that you could just say the heck with what the insurance company was doing in terms of gatekeeping, the heck with the fact that doctors might have found you competitive and been owning your clinics and orthopedics, physician-owned practices, where you didn't have the control over your profession. And I just did it, naively and therefore first and fast. And that's a lot of what I feel now with the AI movement. There were no rules against certain things. So therefore I could do it until someone would stop me. If I Had Had AI Back Then Unfortunately, AI right now is very, very dangerous to take that same mentality as entrepreneurship. So there's a lot to say. I opened up a My Body Brand Academy. It was a brand academy for my peers. I was focused from the women's health aspect to a women's empowerment aspect, which was what the core work of my center was. It was lifestyle, it was coaching. was all the things that I didn't realize were in 10 years gonna be the way the rest of my peers would finally welcome. I didn't know how long it was gonna take. I knew it was a trend, that's why I went on it. I just didn't know that they were gonna do such a radical thing and it was gonna end up being economics. so economics, health policy, health politics, economics, the academia, all of that is very intertwined. And I'm gonna be bringing that into my show now. We're gonna move a lot more from the symptoms and the place that I was working at when I introduced this show back in 2016. We were hopeful the US was gonna, it was October of 2016. We were very hopeful the US was gonna finally catch up to the rest of the world and the reorganizing world order and vote in our first woman president. (07:04.906) It served a purpose to connect me and connect my audience with other women who had also flipped their pain and turned into a passion project and a career they loved, particularly in healthcare, initially in healthcare. then I brought in towards the pandemic, I was already starting to bring in the other medicine women that I was seeing leaving corporate, leaving finance, leaving academics to basically do what I did, which was make sure that I was gonna be the mom I wanted to be, along with being the, you know, have the career ladder, have the leadership support, because once you leave the system, everyone knows once you have kids, you have a mommy tax, a huge mommy tax here in America. I had gone through my own health stuff, and that's what got me into women's health, like I said, particularly around the pregnancy and maternity care, which I believe is a two-year window. Why To Push The Next Era of Centering Moms Again Because my philosophy was if mommy's happy, then everyone else can get the care and the support and everything she learns for herself. But I needed to catch her before she was busy being distracted again. And as much as I wanted to speak to the women and talk to the women in terms of their health and owning their health, a lot of them didn't listen to me. Third wave feminism, we have a lot to say. We have so much to say. And they wouldn't come to me. They wouldn't end up on my treatment tables and on my yoga mats and working with my mommy coaches and anybody like that until they broke. And at that point we're already downstream to the point that they're so overwhelmed. And again, I see the parallel now with AI and I see it with flooding the zone with what's happening politically in the U S but I see it from a symptoms model, but also from the systems model. Luckily I am not normal neuro normative. And so I have always seen things from the big system, which is why I could connect the dots a decade plus ahead of my peers and just go into direct primary care, physical therapy and allied health. Meaning if I could have gotten a nurse, I would have gotten a nurse on board. I hadn't grown big enough yet to do that. I tried to get an OB-GYN to think about it, but she just couldn't, although she was one of my clients. (09:26.838) She couldn't fathom in her head because of the way the system worked. And she was so indebted to the insurance companies for how she was gonna get paid. And now we see all the mass exodus 13 years later with direct primary care physicians, right? They finally realized what PTs were doing, what OTs were doing, what speech pathologists were doing. And we're seeing it go down the rabbit hole. So there's a lot bigger audience to hear this conversation in terms of where we are now outside of just the entrepreneurial and opening up our own little utopias, we can't do that anymore. We need to start networking the little utopias that we did opened up in our little clinics and centers. And in 2023, I thought we were kind of like past that. The clinical in me was being phased out. I was done with that, especially post pandemic. And I really wanted to work on leadership support because a lot of the branding and the positioning and the opening up of markets that I had done with the, you know, close to 300 women at that point, I didn't see that carry over because I realized we really hadn't worked out some of the power dynamics. And it wasn't a matter of confidence and imposter syndrome and everything else getting shoved down these women's throats. It was honestly being able to Neuro-regulate and keep your momentum while the chaos is happening. And so a lot of them reverted back into their cocoons and their little utopias. if they did, they didn't utilize a lot of the things I had told them, which would have positioned them through the pandemic a lot stronger. And we've seen a big drop off of yoga studios. We've seen a big drop off of just yoga therapists in general. (11:30.472) The New Day for Yoga Therapists...and other Allied Health Pros There's been a big...reshuffle on there and it's really pulling us all up. You know, like it looks bad, but it's really pulling us all to really step into our authority. And so, you know, the 2025 version of the U.S. began calling me really big and strong. Back to that maternal intent, meaning that if if mama can get this, if she could figure this out. And when I'm talking about owning her health right now, I'm talking about all the systems, the social determinants of health, then her community thrives. I mean, we have the research on this. I am not sitting here from a place of convincing anyone. I might've done that 20 years ago. I might've done that even 10 years ago. I am coming from a place of conviction. I've always leaned towards conviction once I've had people in my circles and doing things either be the goddess wisdom mastermind, inside my my huts of the belly guru, mama guru and kid guru and baby guru and all of the things I packaged up and was able to bring out of that little idea of saying what could I have used postpartum so that I didn't end up with postpartum depression? What could my mother have used years ago that she didn't end up with cancer and her body sort of like being chronically inflammatory? HER medicine of the early 2000's was still missing a lot of connections between her stress hormones and her sex hormones. And that never went on enough. kind of, the bad part of being ahead of the game so far, years, a decade in my case, is that you are completely exhausted by the time people catch on. And so yeah, I had my online academy, you know, it brought me in good money to get through the pandemic and through the inevitable divorce that ended up happening through other things of my empowerment and trying to go bigger and grow bigger, which I know is what a lot of women with momentum, intelligence, strong, capable, highly recognized women and have been dealing with when our men in our realm couldn't keep up and we outgrew them. (13:53.054) And they outgrew us because they wanted us to be. And so we've got this big manosphere and we've got all of this stuff going. I can connect the dots on that. And I can do it in a way that's... Bigger than, bigger than the impact to our personal lives, bringing the message of owning her health back with a redirection to the systems versus just the symptoms, although the symptoms we feel, meaning that the dysregulation, all the issues that happen during transitional period, transitional times such as the onset of our first cycles and motherhood and maternity and postpartum and menopause and all of those things are super important. But there are plenty of podcasts on that. There are plenty of discussions on that. But where are we really connecting the dots now to rebuild? Because I'm already in the new world. I was in the new world pandemic. You know, like I had gone through a divorce. I had gone through a lot of things. And I was already shifting to say, know, where can we move this so that we have career activists? And where are our leaders in healthcare in all of this? I don't mean influencers. I don't mean, you know, people who are pushing a product or an app or something like that. I'm talking about... (15:35.566) Health Politics in Women You know, In 2015, we were connecting the dots here in the US, after just only starting to research women when I went to college. So in the mid 90s, we were already from the mid 90s to 20 years later already connecting the dots on maternal health, the heavy weight of our maternal morbidity, which is horrible here in the US considering the costs. But that's because of the focus and the politics around women, the community health, non-medical infrastructural needs for improving the social determinants of health and the way women themselves, as I said, are the link between fertilizing the care economy, which holds up any other economy all over the world. Definitely within our towns and our regions, the civil, Women being the center of civilization means keeping humanity in that civics aspect and Quite honestly with the technological progress Especially how we're using it from the atomic bomb on once we were able to start using things as weapons of mass destruction She it is her and so I when I say owning her health I'm talking about owning her systemic health And I think I always was, but I didn't understand that until 2025, until the version of the US 2025. Because today in 2026, as I'm recording this, the state of Ohio wants every pregnancy documented, including spontaneous abortions. They're calling abortions. It's called a miscarriage. Miscarriage has always been under cared for in this country. I don't see why they don't understand that's God's will. That's God's will sometimes. And we are basically putting people already, again, I'm in the Carolinas, we've already had a woman in Atlanta, our neighbor here, used as a human incubator and her baby's gonna suffer for the rest of his life because you're not supposed to gestate babies in dead women's wombs. But our government and our governments are fighting against these things. (17:58.324) So I'm mainly here rebooting not just because of what's going on with women, but it's with the intent to once again hold the bio-spiritual ecology wisdom, which is my reframe on the bio-psycho-social model that was coming into existence through functional medicine, through lifestyle medicine. 10, 15 years into that conversation, but it needs to evolve now. Cause it needs to make sure we don't lose it from the humanity, which I'm sorry, but that is the spirituality. Right now it's getting conflated as it always does for control into a religious doctrine. We see the Abrahamic religions all at war right now. And so, whereas I started this conversation 20 years ago, of how can we bring in the holistic understanding of that bio-spiritual ecology and from the Eastern medicine into the Western medicine. Now I'm saying, how the hell are we going to bring the East and West together, the geopolitics, the impact of what's going on with her, with her wherever she is with what's going on here in this nation right now at our local communities, how can we discuss what needs to happen on the ground now? Because listen, we're gonna need the health providers to step up. This isn't about making your circles and your products and your programs anymore. You're gonna need to start the allied health people are gonna need to start first the bifurcation of healthcare has been here, okay?the arm of medicine, have the arm of community health, we're taking it back. And allied health is going to step into that leadership. It's gonna have to. And if the physicians and the nurses want to follow us to some extent in some of those models that are more on a horizontal, so be it, wonderful. We welcome that. This isn't an anti-medicine thing. That crap show is a mess. It is too expensive. (20:25.186) The Past Rhymes 2026, We don't have access, people have lost access. So what are we doing? Boots on the ground here while our government is deciding to play war and make themselves rich with boots on the ground of our military. Like what are we doing right now? No matter what happens with the United States economy, whatever happens with our democracy, whatever happens, like what are we still doing? Because I'm gonna guarantee you in the end when this is all over, it will be the women. And we're gonna need to, if you thought you needed to be neuro-regulated to just sit at Thanksgiving dinner, girl, you're gonna need to learn how to be neuro-regulated when you're standing face to face with literal oppressive suppression of everything you wanted to do, openly allowed and possibly being in more of a civil rights activist mode than ever before. That's the reality of it. Now, I think I have ways that we can be talking about it in a way that's, it's not gonna be like the 1960s civil rights. I hope, I hope we've evolved enough. I do believe we have women in position and with an education and. I'm not discounting the men whatsoever. Please don't hear that as it but this Podcast and I hope you would really remember that the reason we're where we're at right now in the whole country Which hasn't been helpful to men or women or the children? But only been helpful to the oligarchs and the people who keep extracting and I'm gonna call them the predator class They are the predator class. They are the E-file class and they are working on a global basis right now to not help us. Okay, that is the America we have right now, the United States of America, because there's many Americas, okay? I hope you understand the reason we're here is because we were so effectively holding people accountable that they got scared. We were doing so much. (22:38.562) We were doing so much despite the planning for 40, 50 years of project 2025 and the conservative sort of Alliance into nationalism and this whole empiric reversal. It's like they're pushing so hard desperately because we were so effective. And so this I hope you would consider, you know, inquisitively following following this this this publication and as you're listening to and reading some of the public publication, think to sponsor because any income generated will be to support the reformation of my role at this point. And as a networking architect in this next chapter of reconstruction, and what are we reconstructing? Personally for me, it's the US Trust in Health Leadership. foundational relationships in society. Again, it comes to the women. Why? Because no human on this earth did not initially imprint their idea of relationship in their idea. Is the world a threat or is it a heaven or a hell outside of the womb of their mother? Okay, just nobody's better than anybody else. But there's some people that are equipped for this. Okay, this ain't DEI. in the way it's been weaponized, okay? Nobody's being, nobody being made special, just some people were made for the task at hand. And during this transitional time of a birth of a new world order, we are in the traditional phase of this birth. That is the fourth phase. If you don't even understand we have a fourth phase, if you thought it was just, you know, preterm labor and then active pushing, and then the baby comes out that you didn't understand this transition, then that's why you need to read my publication, listen to my podcast, and support this conversation because there are so many deaths to be connected here. And honestly, helping the women and re-centralizing some of the conversations around her health and the social determinants of health is gonna help everyone. It is going to help all the men. Because I'm not even gonna get into this at this point, but it is going to help all the men, okay? (25:24.514) And so I welcome, thank you for welcoming me back. I'm excited. I'm sad, I'm still working with grief that we have to be back here right now, but I'm looking forward to having another decade maybe of this wonderful conversation. And I am excited for when I do that 2036 post saying, you know what, we accomplished it. We got back in the saddle and we accomplished that original vision that I had that I sort of aborted and got distracted with myself. Let's see what's to come. Thank you so much. Again, I'm Dr. Lisette Alvarez-Holland, and I am waiting to hear your input. This is going to be an interactive thing, and I can't wait for the next episode of Owning Her Health. Thanks so much.
