Not everyone arrives at homeopathy through an open door. For Lisa Strbac, certified homeopath and host of the Raw Health Rebel podcast, the path began with doubt, desperation, and one very dramatic first remedy. When I sat down with Lisa for this episode of Homeopathy Hangout, I was immediately struck by how honestly she told her story, because it is the kind of story that cuts straight through any scepticism you might still be carrying.
Lisa came from an accounting background with no particular interest in natural health. What changed everything was her oldest daughter’s health. Born by caesarean section, her daughter cycled through constant ear infections and repeated courses of antibiotics from a very young age. Then a flu vaccine tipped things over the edge into what Lisa describes as a nightmare: a debilitating autoimmune condition that led them all the way to Great Ormond Street Hospital, where the only solution on offer was a year of prophylactic antibiotics.
“Going along with everything I’d been told has led us to this point,” Lisa recalled thinking. Her gut simply would not let her agree to that course of action.
Lisa began researching alternatives and read a book called Healing the New Childhood Epidemics, which pointed her toward a biomedical approach. But she still felt she was just substituting one set of remedies for another, without truly getting to the root cause. Then she came across a chapter written by Dr. Jane Donegan, a homeopathic doctor, in a book called Toxic World, Toxic People. Something in Dr. Donegan’s writing clicked.
“Because she was a doctor, it felt more palatable at that point,” Lisa said, laughing at her own former self. She attended a one-day seminar Dr. Donegan ran on raising healthy children, covering terrain theory, toxic overload, suppression, and the body’s need to release its toxic burden. Lisa and her husband left that seminar feeling as though everything they thought they knew had been turned upside down.
She booked a consultation. And then, sitting in the room watching Dr. Donegan look things up in her books and ask about her daughter’s dreams and food preferences, Lisa’s scepticism came flooding back. She walked out thinking it was, in her own words, “a bit of old twiddle twaddle.” She shelved homeopathy entirely.
Then her daughter had another flare. Her biomedical doctor encouraged her to try the remedy Dr. Donegan had already prescribed, a nosode called Proteus. Lisa dissolved it in water and gave her daughter a sip, without telling her what it was.
“There was no placebo effect because she didn’t even know,” Lisa said.
Within moments, her daughter was screaming that her ears hurt. This was a child who had never experienced pain with her ear infections despite having had over twenty of them. Her body was finally doing what it was supposed to do. That evening a rash appeared on her back. The next morning Lisa woke to find strange greyish-red marks running down her daughter’s skin, what she suspects was a Bartonella-related rash drawing everything to the surface.
Within 48 hours, it had all settled. Her daughter was calmer, happier, and more herself than she had been in years. Within two weeks, Lisa had devoured every homeopathy book she could find and signed up to study at the College of Homeopathic Education (CHE). She has never looked back.
As Marcus Fernandez, the principal at CHE, told her at the open day: “You don’t find homeopathy. It finds you.”
Lisa is careful to point out that her daughter’s recovery took about two years of regular homeopathic care, not one dramatic dose and done. “It’s very rare that you’ll see a homeopath and within one remedy you’re fixed,” she said. “You need to commit to it.” Progress came in waves, sometimes spectacular, sometimes subtle, but always moving in the right direction.
A remarkable episode unfolded partway through that journey when the family’s homeopath, Hilary Dorian, prescribed a new remedy for Lisa’s daughter. Shortly after, Lisa’s husband fell severely ill with whooping cough, apparently through some kind of energetic exchange. He resisted homeopathic treatment for two months, during which he cracked his ribs from coughing, was prescribed asthma medication by conventional doctors, and was off work entirely. Finally he agreed to see a homeopath. Within 24 hours of taking Tuberculinum, followed by Causticum and Phosphorus, he was significantly better.
Lisa herself also contracted whooping cough at the same time, but her presentation was completely different: hers settled in the sinuses rather than the chest. She was prescribed Medorrhinum, and that night experienced what she described as an extraordinary release of congestion. By morning she could breathe again.
“I think that’s how differently different people present with the same illness,” she reflected. It was a vivid lesson in the individualised nature of homeopathic prescribing.
Lisa also shared that part of the family’s healing involved grief. She and her husband had lost their first baby, a son, late in pregnancy, and had been carrying that grief silently for years. Traditional Chinese medicine associates the lungs with grief, and she believes the whooping cough gave her family the opportunity to release what had been held deep inside. Her husband, in particular, was treated with grief remedies as part of his recovery.
“If we don’t do the work, I think our body will do the work for us,” she said.
When I asked Lisa where she sees homeopathy’s greatest strength, her answer was immediate: emotional healing. In her practice, she finds that most physical illnesses trace back to an emotional event, and that the most profoundly rewarding cases she has worked with involve clients coming in with severe anxiety or depression.
“The talking starts the healing process,” she said. “And then when they take the remedies, they become much more aware of how it’s affecting them emotionally.”
She made an important point that I think is worth sitting with: as homeopaths, we never push clients further than they are willing to go. Homeopathy can work on a purely physical level if that is where someone is comfortable. But for those who are ready to go deeper, the results can be truly transformative.
I shared my own experience of a client who came in for a plantar wart she had carried for ten years, and who left the consultation feeling lighter after opening up about her childhood. Her wart was gone within a month. Lisa laughed and agreed that many people might hesitate to book an appointment if they knew just how much we explore the mental and emotional landscape in a consultation. Perhaps that is not always a bad thing.
Another area Lisa feels passionate about is homeopathic detox therapy. She has been studying post-graduate seminars with Tom Janssen and has been applying his method in her practice. The premise is that modern bodies carry a far greater toxic load than people did in Hahnemann’s time: glyphosate, antibiotics, contraceptives, vaccines, steroids, general anaesthetic, IVF treatment and more. A classical constitutional remedy may not be sufficient on its own to move through all of that.
Lisa has been genuinely surprised by the emotional dimension of detox work. After an MMR detox, one client reported that her daughter had become markedly more affectionate. After a contraceptive detox, another client told Lisa: “I am feeling gratitude for the first time in my life. I’ve always known it intellectually, but for the first time I can feel it in my whole being.”
“How can a contraceptive detox do that?” Lisa said, still a little amazed. But it makes a kind of sense: the contraceptive pill suppresses the reproductive system so profoundly that clearing it from the body can open up emotional pathways that had quietly closed off.
I have been using Tom Janssen’s method for a few years now and have seen similarly remarkable results, including children regaining speech and eye contact after detox work. It continues to be one of the most exciting developments in contemporary homeopathic practice.
I always love asking guests this question, and Lisa did not disappoint.
Lisa is most active on Instagram at @lisastrbac and has her own website at lisastrbac.com. Her podcast, Raw Health Rebel, is available on Apple Podcasts and has been featured in Apple UK’s alternative health all-time bestsellers. It covers homeopathy, natural healing, health activism, and empowering conversations with practitioners and thinkers from all walks of life.
Lisa’s story is a beautiful reminder that some of the most passionate advocates for homeopathy began as its most committed sceptics. If you are sitting on the fence, sometimes all it takes is one astonishing moment to shift everything.
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