Somebody has to be accountable for the list.
A shortlist is only worth reading if you know who made it and who paid for it. Both answers are on this page, and the second one is the whole business.
David Fox-Powell · Los Angeles, California
David Fox-Powell
I left graduate school in geological engineering because I wanted to understand what actually helps people heal, starting with myself. That took me into years of fascial bodywork, where I watched how much pain the body holds and how little of it responds to being talked at.
For a long stretch I carried anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, IBS, and injuries that never fully left. I was useful to other people and stuck on my own account. Eventually I burned out of bodywork and became a software engineer, which is still what I am.
I kept looking. Functional medicine, acupuncture, somatic work. Each one moved something. Then in early 2026 I came to South Africa for ibogaine, and what I found on the way in bothered me more than the medicine did. Every site I read was selling me a room. None of them would tell me who paid them.
So iboga.africa is the thing I wanted and could not find. It reads the files, visits the facilities, asks the regulatory questions in writing, and hands you what it found. It takes nothing from the providers, which is the only reason its shortlist means anything. When the answer is that you should not do this, it says that instead, and it says it during preparation rather than after you have booked a flight.
I am not a clinician, a therapist, or a guide, and this site is careful about that boundary because blurring it is how people get hurt. I am the person who went through the door, came back, and wanted to build a better entrance.
The arrangement, in six lines.
- Who pays us
- You do, and only you. A preparation fee and an integration fee, both quoted before you commit to either, both refundable on the terms written into the handoff.
- Who does not pay us
- Every provider on the shortlist. No commission, no referral fee, no placement bonus, no revenue share, no reciprocal arrangement. If that ever changes it goes on this page before it goes into effect.
- What we are not
- A clinic. Nobody here administers medicine, diagnoses anyone, or bills for treatment. Treatment is delivered by an independent South African provider on their own licence and their own liability.
- How a provider gets listed
- A site visit in person, their screening protocol read end to end, their monitoring setup seen running, their discharge process traced to a named clinician in the client’s own country, and their answers to the same four regulatory questions we hand every reader.
- How a provider comes off
- One refusal to answer in writing. One client discharged to an airport instead of to a clinician. One instance of taking someone our screening had already ruled out.
- What we publish
- No outcome claims, no success rates, no testimonials, no before and after. Not because the stories are not real, but because nobody can verify them and a frightened person cannot tell the difference.