Modern Hormone Advice Has One Goal: Control

Flatten symptoms.
Normalize charts.
Stabilize numbers.

This is not inherently harmful — but it is philosophically opposite to how women were treated for thousands of years.

Folk medicine did not seek hormonal sameness.
It expected fluctuation.
It anticipated cycles, thresholds, and transitions as essential parts of a woman’s life.

Folk Medicine Treated Change as Inevitable

Across cultures:

  • puberty was disruptive
  • fertility was exhausting
  • perimenopause was dangerous
  • elderhood was powerful

None of these experiences were meant to feel “normal.”
They were meant to be navigated with care, ritual, and herbal support.

Modern hormone advice, by contrast, often suppresses signals:

  • stopping bleeding early
  • suppressing ovulation long-term
  • flattening emotional variation
  • overriding heat, sweat, insomnia

Folk medicine saw these as messages, not malfunctions. They informed timing, treatment, and spiritual protection.

Balance vs Timing: The Philosophical Divide

Modern systems aim for balance.
Folk systems prioritized right action at the right time.

A herb used too early could harm; too late, it might be useless.
Even diet and daily practices were adjusted to life stage, season, and circumstance.

This is evident in classical Chinese medicine, where menstrual irregularity was never treated as a pathology. Physicians considered seasonal qi, age, and life context, prescribing herbs to align internal rhythms rather than flatten them. Time was always a partner, not an enemy.

Example: Bitters & Blood

Modern advice often promotes bitters continuously.

Folk medicine restricted bitters:

  • avoided during heavy bleeding years
  • introduced at threshold years
  • emphasized post-menopause

Timing mattered more than dosage. Herbs were part of a larger system: spiritual, social, and physiological.

Folklore in Action: Global Examples

To understand how folk medicine perceived female change, we can look at documented, cross-cultural examples:

  • European Witch Lore (Hutton, The Witch)

    Women with unusual bleeding patterns were sometimes feared for their liminal power.

    Midwives were consulted not to normalize cycles but to guide women through dangerous thresholds.

    Scottish midwives kept rue and yarrow to ward off spirits that might drain strength during menstruation or perimenopause.

  • Balkan Fairies and Threshold Women (Pócs, Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-Eastern Europe)

    Women carried mugwort or juniper pouches to protect against intrusive fairies that could disrupt fertility or vitality.

    These practices were functional, encoded into daily life, and intertwined herbal care with spiritual vigilance.

  • Chinese Medicine (Unschuld, Medicine in China)

    Irregular cycles were read as messages, not disorders.

    Herbs were prescribed contextually, respecting natural fluctuations, and interventions shifted across seasons, life stages, and personal constitution.

  • Japanese Menopause Myths (Lock, Encounters with Aging)

    Edo-period women entering menopause were sometimes feared for disruptive spiritual energy, while others were welcomed as keepers of ancestral wisdom.

    Physiological changes coincided with socially valuable liminal roles.

  • American Midwifery (Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage)

    Perimenstrual and perimenopausal women were given ceremonial roles — dreaming, divining, teaching young women — and access to tonics for endurance, blood, and nervous strength.

    Transition phases were socially functional, not clinical failures.

  • Ayurveda (Wujastyk, The Roots of Ayurveda)

    Herbs and diet were aligned with reproductive cycles and hormonal shifts.

    Shatavari (Asparagus racemosus) supported vitality and spiritual readiness during perimenopause, without suppressing natural changes.

  • Midwives and Nurses in Early Modern Europe (Ehrenreich & English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses)

    Herbal skill often surpassed hormonal management.

    Midwives recognized that fatigue, hot flashes, or irregular cycles were natural signals, and their interventions emphasized prevention, support, and ritual protection, not artificial normalization.

These examples reveal a central principle across continents and eras: traditional medicine treated women as processes unfolding over time, not systems to be artificially stabilized.

Hot flashes, irregular bleeding, and mood changes were messages to navigate, not failures to correct.

Why Women Feel Worse Now

Modern systems often:

  • stabilize when the body should be transitioning
  • stimulate when energy should be conserved
  • silence when protection is needed

Folk medicine expected and respected instability, planning around it with herbs, rituals, and community practices.

This Is Not Nostalgia

Traditional systems had limits.
They lacked modern emergency medicine.

Yet they had a precise understanding of female time.
Modern advice is powerful — but often blind to rhythm.

What Integration Looks Like

  • Not rejection.
  • Not romanticization.

It’s remembering that numbers are not the body — time is.

Herbs, rituals, and social structures were designed to support transitions, not flatten them.

References & Sources

  • Hutton, Ronald — The Witch
  • Pócs, Éva — Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-Eastern Europe
  • Unschuld, Paul — Medicine in China
  • Lock, Margaret — Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan
  • Davis-Floyd, Robbie — Birth as an American Rite of Passage
  • Wujastyk, Dominik — The Roots of Ayurveda
  • Ehrenreich & English — Witches, Midwives, and Nurses

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