Natural Remedies for Menopause: The Approach No One Is Talking About

Women’s health is finally having its moment. Menopause is being discussed in newspapers, podcasts, workplaces, clinics, and across social media. Women who once suffered quietly are speaking openly about hot flushes, insomnia, anxiety, brain fog, joint pain, vaginal changes, loss of libido and the unsettling feeling of no longer recognising themselves.

But there is a gap.

We have expanded the menopause conversation without necessarily expanding the menopause choices.

Natural Remedies for Menopause: The Approach No One Is Talking About

For all the attention women’s health is receiving, the practical conversation around menopause remains surprisingly narrow. Hormone therapy dominates much of the discussion. Antidepressants are often part of the landscape.

But somewhere between pharmaceuticals and the familiar advice to exercise, eat well and reduce stress lies an entire field that receives remarkably little serious public attention:

Medicinal plants and herbal remedies for menopause as biologically active compounds with a long history of therapeutic use and, increasingly, a developing body of modern scientific research.

It is time we started talking about them properly.

Perimenopause: the story that repeats itself

There is a familiar story in women’s health. A woman in her forties — sometimes even her late thirties — visits her doctor because something has changed.

She says: “I just don’t feel like myself anymore.” She may feel anxious for reasons she cannot explain. She may feel irritable or emotionally fragile. Her periods may still be regular, so perimenopause seems too distant to consider.

When obvious disease is excluded and the hormonal context is not recognised, the attention often turns towards emotional health.

Sometimes depression or anxiety is indeed the correct diagnosis. But during midlife, mood changes can often be linked to hormonal fluctuations occurring as part of the menopausal transition.

During perimenopause, ovarian hormone production does not decline in a neat, predictable line. Hormonal patterns can become highly variable. These changes interact with neurotransmitter systems, thermoregulation, sleep, cognition and stress responses. The consequences can be felt throughout the body and in our emotions.

Antidepressants are sometimes prescribed. But they can produce adverse effects, including nausea, sleep disturbance and sexual dysfunction, and some can cause discontinuation symptoms when stopped.

The point is not that antidepressants are necessarily “bad”. The point is that a woman experiencing the hormonal transition deserves to have it recognised before every symptom is separated into an isolated diagnosis.

Antidepressants may help some mood symptoms, but they do not directly address the underlying hormonal fluctuations of perimenopause that may be contributing to how a woman feels.

When menopause becomes a conversation about HRT

Eventually, the picture may become clearer. Periods become irregular. Hot flushes appear. Sleep deteriorates further. The word perimenopause finally enters the room.

And then another word often follows: HRT.

For some women, hormone therapy will be a treatment they choose. Others will not want to use hormones. Some cannot use particular treatments because of their individual medical circumstances. Others may experience adverse effects, have limited access to care, prefer a different therapeutic philosophy, or simply want to explore non-hormonal natural menopause options.

These women deserve more than: Eat well. Exercise. Reduce stress.

All of those things matter enormously. Nutrition, resistance exercise, cardiovascular fitness, sleep, nervous-system regulation, alcohol consumption, smoking, and metabolic health can profoundly influence how we move through midlife.

But lifestyle and pharmaceutical options are not the only two possibilities.

There is a vast therapeutic territory between them. And women have been exploring it for thousands of years.

Herbal remedies for menopause: the missing medicine cabinet

Long before pharmaceutical laboratories existed, humans used plants as medicine.

Traditional Chinese Medicine developed sophisticated botanical formulations. Ayurveda has used medicinal plants for centuries. European herbal medicine, Indigenous medical traditions and countless other healing systems developed extensive knowledge of plants and their physiological effects.

Plants contain pharmacologically active molecules.

Many interact with signalling pathways involved in inflammation, neurotransmission, stress physiology and endocrine function. Some contain phytoestrogens capable of interacting with oestrogen receptors. Others act through mechanisms that are not primarily linked to oestrogen.

This is why herbal supplements for menopause cannot simply be grouped together as though they were one treatment. Different plants contain different compounds, act through different biological pathways and have different levels of scientific evidence behind them.

That is precisely why we need a more sophisticated conversation — not silence.

Why are medicinal plants for menopause still at the edge of the conversation?

This is the question I find increasingly difficult to ignore.

If millions of women are actively seeking natural remedies for menopause and alternatives to HRT, why is evidence-informed botanical medicine still so difficult to navigate?

Part of the answer is scientific.

Studying plants is complicated. A pharmaceutical drug generally contains a defined active ingredient at a defined dose. A medicinal plant may contain dozens of biologically active compounds.

There is also an economic dimension. Developing large clinical trials is expensive. Research investment inevitably follows commercial incentives. Naturally occurring plants generally cannot be patented in the same way as a newly invented pharmaceutical molecule.

This raises a legitimate structural question:

When the financial incentives for studying two therapeutic approaches are profoundly different, should we expect the evidence bases to develop at the same speed?

Endocrine disruptors and menopause: another piece of the picture

Our conversation about menopause tends to begin when symptoms begin.

Biologically, however, a woman does not arrive at menopause carrying only the experiences of the previous six months. She arrives carrying decades of exposures.

Our hormonal systems have been interacting throughout life with our nutritional environment, stress physiology, sleep patterns, light exposure, metabolic health, medicines and environmental chemicals.

Among those exposures are endocrine-disrupting chemicals — substances capable of interfering with our hormones.

They are found in plastics, pesticides, cosmetics and other consumer products. The Endocrine Society defines endocrine-disrupting chemicals as external chemicals capable of interfering with hormones, and the evidence connecting such exposures with human health effects continues to grow.

What remains much harder to establish is the precise consequence of decades of combined exposure for an individual woman entering menopause.

That is an extraordinarily difficult research question.

As humans, we encounter mixtures of substances at different doses, during different developmental windows, over decades. Researchers cannot ethically randomise women to lifelong chemical exposure and wait to see what happens.

So science has to assemble the picture from epidemiological research, mechanistic studies, animal models and laboratory experiments.

That uncertainty deserves a place in conversations about women’s hormonal health, and is fuelling a growing interest in herbal supplements.

What if we approached menopause differently?

Modern menopause medicine often begins with:

What can we give a woman to reduce her symptoms?

That is an important question about quality of life, but it should not be the only one.

We might also ask: What is happening across her endocrine, nervous, metabolic and stress-response systems?

Could particular botanical compounds support some of the physiological systems now under strain?

And rather than waiting until symptoms become unbearable, could we prepare women for this transition years earlier?

That changes menopause care from symptom suppression alone to biological literacy.

And biological literacy gives women something remarkably powerful:

informed choice.

Natural remedies for menopause support: women deserve more options

This is ultimately what concerns me about the current menopause conversation.

Women are too often presented with what feels like a binary choice:

Take hormones.

Or:

Suffer.

There should be more options.

There are herbal approaches. There is nutrition. Exercise. Sleep medicine. Psychological support. Nervous-system regulation. Environmental health.

Botanical medicine deserves to be included in the conversation so that each woman can understand her options and make an informed choice about what feels right for her body and circumstances.

Building a better conversation about natural menopause care

Women searching for a natural approach to menopause should not have to assemble their healthcare from social-media posts, supplement labels, fragmented research and contradictory internet advice.

Health professionals should not have to dismiss herbal approaches simply because they received little education about them.

In women’s health, there is a vast space where curiosity, evidence and individual choice can meet.

This is the space I work in.

As a health scientist, researcher and menopause educator, I want to help translate what we know about medicinal plants, herbal supplements and natural approaches to menopause into language women can understand, while being equally transparent about what we do not yet know.

I want to connect traditional knowledge with contemporary science.

Most importantly, I want women to know that they are not alone in wanting a non-hormonal or more natural approach using plant-based supplements.

The next chapter in menopause care should make both modern medicine and the wisdom of plants visible, allowing women to understand their options and choose from a place of knowledge and empowerment.

About Carla Pontes, PhD

Carla Pontes, PhD, is a health scientist, researcher, menopause educator and integrative health coach with a special interest in evidence-informed natural approaches to perimenopause and menopause. Her work brings together contemporary research, medicinal plants, and lifestyle approaches.

Her work is also deeply personal. Her own menopause journey led her from using hormones to discovering the role medicinal plants could play in her wellbeing — an experience that transformed her relationship with menopause and ultimately shaped the work she does today.

*This article is for educational purposes and does not replace individual medical advice. Herbal supplements can have contraindications and interact with medicines.