My Path
From Hospital Corridors to the Heart of the Amazon
I didn't plan to leave medicine. I planned to fix it from the inside. But some systems don't want to be fixed.
The Beginning
For nearly ten years, I worked as an elderly-care physician in the Netherlands. Every day I walked the corridors of nursing homes and chronic care facilities, sitting with patients in their final years, trying to help them live with dignity.
What I found troubled me deeply. Most of my patients were taking long lists of medications — ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty pills a day. Many had been on these drugs for years. And often, they were suffering because of the medications, not despite them.
The Questioning
I taught myself what medical school never covered: how to stop giving pills. It's called deprescribing — the careful, gradual reduction of unnecessary medications. And the results were sometimes astonishing.
Patients who had been bedridden for years stood up. Parents who had been silent and distant began speaking again, recognizing their children for the first time in months. These weren't miracles. This is simply what happens when you remove the drugs that have been slowly dulling someone's life force.
The Breaking Point
In 2020, I watched policies unfold that I could not reconcile with my medical ethics. I saw patients suffer in isolation. I saw the space for genuine informed consent quietly disappear.
I could no longer participate.
The Medicine
That summer, searching for answers that medicine couldn't provide, I sat in my first ayahuasca ceremony in the forests of the Netherlands. I had prepared carefully — physically, mentally, spiritually. I was ready to receive whatever would come.
What came was clarity. What came was the courage to let go of everything I thought I knew.
The Journey
In early 2021, my husband and I left the Netherlands for Brazil. We found the ancient indigenous traditions in the Amazon and we found Santo Daime.
Santo Daime is a Brazilian tradition in which ayahuasca is taken as a sacrament in communal ceremony. Unlike the commercialized retreat model, Santo Daime is fundamentally egalitarian: medicine shared together, in song and prayer, as equals. This is not therapy administered to a patient. It is spiritual practice, lived in community.
For five years now, I have been immersed in this world. Participating in ceremony. Studying with experienced practitioners. Learning to integrate ancient wisdom with everything I knew before.
"I left because I believe healing should serve the person — not protocols, not institutions, not pharmaceutical profits. Ayahuasca showed me there was another way."
The Integration
Today I live in the beautiful mountains in the south of Brazil, the 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 am offering something different: independent health advice from someone who has walked both paths — the clinical and the ceremonial — and found wisdom in each.
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.
Medical Degree
MD, specialised in elderly care medicine
Philosophy
MA with honours, University of Groningen
Clinical Experience
Nearly 10 years in geriatric, palliative, and chronic care
Plant Medicine
5 years studying modern day ayahuasca culture in Brazil
Languages
Dutch · English · Portuguese