About Strelitzia
A doctor who left the system and found another perspective on health
I m Dr. Lisa Bennink, MD, MA — former Dutch elderly-care physician, now an independent health advisor and student of traditional plant medicine in Brazil.I didn’t plan to leave medicine. I planned to fix it from the inside. But some systems don’t want to be fixed.For nearly ten years I worked as an elderly-care physician in the Netherlands, walking the corridors of nursing homes and chronic care facilities. I saw patients taking ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty pills a day — and often suffering because of those medications. I taught myself deprescribing, the careful, gradual reduction of unnecessary drugs. The results were sometimes astonishing: people who had been bedridden stood up again; parents who had been distant began recognising their children.In 2020 those questions became impossible to ignore. I watched policies I could no longer reconcile with my medical ethics. I resigned.That same summer I sat in my first ayahuasca ceremony in the forests of the Netherlands. What came was clarity and the courage to let go. In early 2021 my husband and I moved to Brazil to study ayahuasca within its living spiritual context. We found Santo Daime — a Brazilian tradition where the medicine is taken as a sacrament in communal ceremony, egalitarian, in song and prayer. For five years now I have been immersed in this world, participating in ceremony, studying with experienced practitioners, and learning to integrate ancient wisdom with everything I knew from clinical practice.I left because I believe healing should serve the person — not protocols, not institutions, not pharmaceutical profits. Ayahuasca showed me there was another way.Today I live in Brazil’s Serra Gaúcha. I offer remote sessions to people around the world who are ready to question what they’ve been told about health. I am not practicing medicine. I provide independent health advice — not medical treatment, diagnosis, or prescriptions — from someone who has walked both paths: the clinical and the ceremonial.My perspective is shaped by nearly a decade of caring for patients, a Master’s degree in philosophy, and five years of studying with plant teachers. I have no pharmaceutical ties. No institutional affiliations. My only agenda is to help you find healing.This is a conversation between two adults. I will share what I see, what I’ve learned, and what I honestly think. What you do with that is up to you.
Connect with me on
X: @Strelitzia_heal
Website: strelitzia.health
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