Dr. Elisabeth (Lisa) J.C. Bennink, MD, MA
When the prescription list has grown too long — and no one has ever questioned it.
You are likely here because something no longer sits right.
Medications you have been taking for years — and no one has ever proposed reducing them. A diagnosis you are not fully convinced by. A treatment plan that feels too automatic, or arrived at too fast.
Or you are managing care for a parent, and sense that what is being done around them is not aligned with how you understand good care.
Some arrive here after a plant medicine experience — one that opened something important, but left them without a physician who will think about it seriously.
This is not for people who want to be told what to do. It is for people who want to understand the reasoning — and decide for themselves.
Deprescribing is the core of my work.
I take your full medication list and examine it thoroughly — not just what you are taking, but why each drug was originally started, whether the evidence still supports continuing it, how the drugs interact with each other, and what you have been told versus what the research actually says.
Then I think with you about what might reasonably be reduced, tapered, or stopped. I give you the clinical reasoning in full — not a verdict, but the thinking behind it. You decide what to do with that. Most clients bring those findings back to their own physician.
The results of careful deprescribing are often more significant than people expect. I have seen people who had lain in bed for years stand up after stopping the wrong medications. Parents who had stopped recognising their children begin calling them by name. This is not remarkable — it is what happens when medication harms are finally taken seriously.
Alongside deprescribing, I offer:
I do not replace your physician, and I do not prescribe. My Dutch medical licence recently expired; I work as an independent consultant. What I offer is careful clinical reasoning — from someone who spent nearly a decade inside the medical system, and several years since then studying what it misses.
Three steps. No unnecessary complexity.
Often, by the time someone reaches out, they already know something is not right.
The medication list does not review itself.
Serra Gaúcha, Brazil
I am a Dutch physician, a deprescribing specialist, and an ayahuasqueira. I left conventional medicine in 2020 and have lived in Brazil since 2021.
These are not separate facts. The physician who questions what is being prescribed and the person who lives inside an ancient plant medicine tradition are the same person, asking the same question: what does healing actually require — and what gets in the way of it?
I write at Brownstone Institute and at Substack. I see a small number of clients for independent medical consultation.
Dr. Elisabeth (Lisa) J.C. Bennink, MD, MA, trained as an elderly care physician in the Netherlands and holds a Master's degree in Philosophy of medical sciences with honors from the University of Groningen, where she focused on medical ethics.
From the age of 25 she worked in nursing homes, hospitals, and people's homes, providing daily consultations and geriatric assessments across nearly a decade of clinical practice. She developed expertise in psychogeriatric, chronic somatic, and palliative care — and became known for her work in deprescribing.
Soon after entering elderly care, she began questioning the long medication lists her patients were carrying — drugs they had often been taking for years without review. Through sustained self-study she learned what medical training rarely teaches: how to stop giving pills, and how much people benefit from this.
She found the clinical space to apply this knowledge, and helped hundreds of patients significantly reduce or stop their use of psychiatric drugs, cardiovascular agents, palliative medications, and sleeping pills. The results were often striking. People who had lain in bed for years stood up. Parents who had stopped recognising their children began calling them by name.
She is grateful for the trust her patients placed in her during important phases of their lives — and for the opportunity, at a young age, to learn what medicine can do when it works in the patient's direction rather than against it.
Beyond direct clinical work, she was commissioned by the healthcare insurer Menzis to develop a care model for community-dwelling elderly patients, and advised — on behalf of the Dutch association of elderly care physicians, Verenso — the Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Sport on improving elderly care in the Netherlands. She contributed to the book Het verpleeghuis is het einde! and was featured in Minister Hugo de Jonge's reflective vlog on the future of elderly care.
In December 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I stepped away from a medical career I had spent nearly a decade building — and from a directorship offer I had just received — because I could no longer practice medicine in a way that honored my patients.
Informed consent had quietly disappeared. Elderly patients were being isolated from their families without clinical justification. Colleagues had stopped asking the questions they had trained to ask. When I tried to raise these concerns — with colleagues, with friends, with the institutions I had worked within — I found the space for dialogue had closed.
I kept speaking anyway. First in Dutch, then in English, and eventually here.
In April 2021 I moved with my husband to Brazil to study ancient healing traditions. I learned to speak Portuguese fluently within a year, and immersed myself in plant medicine traditions, modern-day Brazilian ayahuasca culture, and spirituality.
What started as extensive travelling throughout the country soon became a journey inwards. I came to live in close proximity to nature, and to feed myself with natural whole foods and occasional fasts. Spiritual practices — prayer, meditation, and yoga — became part of a daily routine. Through singing, I found my own voice. In the process of this transformation, I experienced significant personal healing, including resolution of long-standing back pain that had been treated as chronic.
Because of the new environment and the distance from my former profession and colleagues, I found the inner space to truly question everything: what do I really know? Today I study with an open mind, and have come to see that many long-held beliefs are simply not true — that what was learned in medical school often does not serve our healing. I have gained a new perspective on health and healing.
I am now part of the inner team of a spiritual house in São Paulo, where I help organize ceremonial work across Brazil. Five years inside the Santo Daime tradition have taught me what clinical training could not: that healing is not only biochemical, and that the institutions we have built around medicine are not the only holders of knowledge about the human body and spirit.
I offer two consultations. Both are real medical consultations. The difference is depth.
I work with a small number of clients at a time, on purpose. Long conversations need time between them.
Before we meet, I send you a short intake form and read it carefully. This means we begin the consultation already oriented to your question — not spending the first twenty minutes on background.
We work through your medications, your history, or the decision you are facing. After our conversation, I write a summary of my clinical reasoning — something you can keep, share with your own physician, or bring into a subsequent conversation.
Most people begin here.
Book a 60-minute consultationA focused medical consultation around one clear question. Not a preliminary — a complete session on its own, with a clear beginning and end.
The right choice when your situation is relatively contained, when you have a specific medication or finding you want me to look at, or when you need a single answer rather than a full review.
Book a 30-minute consultationQuestions before booking? Write to info@strelitzia.health
I write about medicine, freedom, plant teachers, and the courage to question what we have been taught about health. Essays appear at Brownstone Institute and on Substack.
On the growing push to place psychedelics under medical authority — and why plant medicines belong to all of humanity, not to the "church of medicine."
→ Read on BrownstoneA review of the landmark account of psychiatric treatment resistance — and why deprescribing deserves far more attention than it receives.
→ Read on BrownstoneOn healing, deprescribing, plant medicine, and what I have learned since leaving the system — written from Brazil, for people on their own search.
→ Read on SubstackEach new essay, directly to your inbox. No frequency pressure — only when there is something worth saying.
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