✦ About our Rise Today Consulting founder
Meet Dr.
Erica Harris.
Dr. Erica Harris brings a rare combination of lived experience and professional depth to her work in resilience, keynote speaking, and cancer mindset coaching.
Before founding Rise Today Consulting, Erica spent her career as a sports chiropractor and kinesiologist, holding credentials in BHKIN, DC, and MACP. She was the founder and operator of Peak Performance Chiropractic Health Centre, a multidisciplinary health centre in Vancouver, Canada. There, she worked with professional athletes, weekend warriors, and individuals of all ages and abilities — helping them optimize movement, manage pain, recover from injury, and support their overall health and well-being. Her clinical work included biomechanical and functional assessments, exercise prescription, injury prevention and rehabilitation, patient education, and individualized health and wellness strategies.
As the founder and operator of a multidisciplinary healthcare clinic, Erica also led a team of healthcare professionals and managed day-to-day clinic operations — experience that shaped her understanding of leadership, team dynamics, client care, and what it takes to build and run a healthcare business.
Erica is a retired sports chiropractor and kinesiologist (BHKIN, DC, MACP) — she is not currently practicing. Today, she channels that same depth of expertise into resilience keynote speaking, workshops, and empowered cancer mindset coaching and advocacy, helping individuals and organizations navigate adversity, rebuild, and rise.
Twice.
Given the gift of a
second chance
✦ A life shaped by resilience
A life shaped by resilience.
Rise Today Consulting Services was born from lived experience, a professional dedication to health and wellness, and a profound belief in the resilience of the human spirit.
For many years, Erica devoted her professional life to helping others achieve optimal health and performance. As a sports chiropractor and kinesiologist, she founded and directed a thriving multidisciplinary healthcare practice in Vancouver, British Columbia — her work centred on movement, recovery, and helping people build stronger bodies and healthier lives.
Yet life has a way of challenging us all. While nursing her youngest son, Erica was abruptly and shockingly diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia — an aggressive, life-threatening cancer. Despite intensive treatment, she did not respond to salvage chemotherapy. Two leading international medical institutions — one in Canada, one in the United States — ultimately advised that no options remained beyond palliative care. In 2012 she was given a terminal prognosis and expected to live no more than two months.
Faced with the unthinkable, and determined to spend every possible moment with her two young children, Erica fought to return home. There she explored every possible path to healing within the natural-health world — and against overwhelming odds, she achieved remission. That remission allowed her to undergo a life-saving bone marrow transplant, thanks to an extraordinary donor: a complete stranger from Germany who stepped forward to help save her life.
TEDx
2×
✦ In Erica’s words
“Twice I was told my life was ending. Twice, strangers stepped forward and gave me the gift of time. My mission now is to help others rise through their hardest seasons and live with more joy and fulfillment.”
✦ Twice broken, twice rebuilt
Twice broken, twice rebuilt.
The transplant brought new life in more ways than one. Erica’s blood type even changed — from O negative to A positive — a powerful symbol of the second chance she had been given.
Slowly, she rebuilt her strength. Before long she was again hiking mountains, skiing steep descents, and embracing the physical vitality she had once known. But the journey was not over.
Years later, Erica began experiencing severe breathlessness while hiking. Doctors discovered bronchiolitis obliterans — a form of graft-versus-host disease in which her transplanted immune system began attacking her lungs. Once again, her life hung in the balance.
Erica fell to 80 lbs and was prescribed oxygen. She was later given another extraordinary gift — a double lung transplant, made possible through the generosity of a family who chose to give life in the midst of their own profound loss. Through courage, rehabilitation and determination, she rebuilt her life once more — and, when her marriage later ended, dusted herself off and reinvented herself again.
