Let us start with a question nobody is really asking loudly enough.
If the evidence has existed for decades that natural plant-based remedies can reduce period pain, balance hormones, support the nervous system and help women move through their cycles with far less suffering, why is that not the first thing a woman is offered when she walks into a doctor’s office?
Why is the first answer still a pill?
We are not here to tear down modern medicine. It has saved lives and will continue to save them. Surgical advances, emergency care, diagnostics that can identify illness before it becomes crisis, these are extraordinary things and we do not take them for granted.
But medicine is also a business. And understanding that, really understanding it, changes the way you see almost everything.
The System Was Not Built to Heal You Completely
Here is something that sounds cynical until you look at the numbers.
There is significantly more money in managing a chronic condition than in resolving it. A woman who takes ibuprofen every month for period pain is a customer for life. A woman who understands her cycle, nourishes her body through each phase, and no longer reaches for a painkiller is not.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is just the logic of how markets work.
The global women’s health pharmaceutical market is valued at hundreds of billions of pounds. A substantial portion of it rests on products that address symptoms, not root causes. Hormonal contraceptives that suppress the cycle entirely. NSAIDs prescribed for pain that could be reduced through nutrition, herbal support, and cycle awareness. Antidepressants handed to women experiencing luteal phase mood shifts that are, at their core, a signal from a body asking for something different.
These are all legitimate treatments in certain contexts. We are not saying otherwise.
What we are saying is that prevention is not profitable in the same way. And the decisions about what gets researched, funded, and promoted are shaped by that reality more than most people realise.
Who Is Funding the Science?
This is where it gets uncomfortable.
A landmark systematic review published in PMC examined 30 studies on pharmaceutical industry funding and found that studies sponsored by drug companies were over four times more likely to produce results favouring the sponsor’s product than independently funded research (odds ratio 4.05, 95% CI 2.98 to 5.51). Four times more likely.
Research published in the Journal of Political Economy found that psychiatric drugs appeared substantially more effective in manufacturer-sponsored trials than when the exact same drugs were tested against the same comparators by independent researchers. Same molecules. Same outcomes measured. Dramatically different results depending on who paid for the study.
A 2008 analysis of antidepressant trials submitted to the FDA found that pharmaceutical companies published 97% of trials with positive results. Only 39% of trials with negative or questionable results ever made it into print.
This is called publication bias. And it means that the scientific literature available to your doctor, the studies that shape the prescriptions they write, are not a neutral picture of what works. They are a curated one.
Between 25% and 50% of drug trial results submitted to regulatory bodies never get published at all, according to research published in PMC. The ones that do tend to be the ones that make the drug look good.
None of this is secret. It is documented in peer-reviewed journals. It is discussed in academic circles. It just never makes it into the mainstream conversation because the mainstream conversation is, in many ways, funded by the same industry.
The Woman Who Was Never the Default
Now layer this on top of something even more fundamental.
Until 2016, the National Institutes of Health did not require sex to be considered as a biological variable in most studies it funded. Until 2016. Research that shaped decades of medical practice, clinical guidelines, and drug dosages was conducted predominantly on male subjects and applied to everyone.
A 2025 analysis published in PNAS examined over 21,000 emergency department records and found that female patients were consistently less likely to receive pain medication than male patients, even after accounting for reported pain scores. Women’s pain scores were 10% less likely to be recorded by nurses at all. Women spent an average of 30 extra minutes in the emergency room before receiving care.
A survey of over 110,000 women in the UK, conducted as part of the Government’s Women’s Health Strategy, found that 50% of respondents felt their pain had been disregarded or overlooked by the healthcare system. One in three women felt dismissed and unheard by practitioners. Not some of the time. As a pattern.
Women with endometriosis wait an average of 8 years and 10 months for a proper diagnosis in the UK, according to a 2024 survey of 4,371 women by Endometriosis UK. The most recent data from 2025 shows that figure has now surpassed 9 years, and is still rising. Almost 9 years of being told their pain is normal. Being told it is psychological. Being sent home.
“There’s a long-standing idea that because women endure childbirth they’re meant to endure pain.”
— Researcher, Harvard Medical School
This is not medicine. This is cultural bias wearing a white coat.
What COVID Quietly Revealed
The pandemic forced a moment of collective reckoning that most people are still processing.
Overnight, the world became acutely aware of the immune system in a way it never had been before. People began asking questions about vitamin D, zinc, gut health, inflammation, and lifestyle factors that support immune resilience. Many turned to herbal remedies, to the plants that had been used across cultures for centuries to support the body through illness.
And something interesting happened. A significant portion of those conversations were dismissed, suppressed, or labelled misinformation, while pharmaceutical solutions were fast-tracked with a speed that had never been seen before in medical history. A vaccine developed and deployed in under a year. The fastest vaccine development in history, by a margin of decades.
We are not making a claim about whether that was right or wrong. What we are observing is the contrast.
The same institutions that took decades to acknowledge the science on ginger and period pain, that have spent generations dismissing women’s symptoms, that publish only the trials that make their products look good, moved with extraordinary urgency when there was a global commercial and political imperative to do so.
And in that contrast, a lot of people began asking a question they had never thought to ask before:
Who decides what is worth knowing?
Nature Does Not Belong to Anyone
Here is the fundamental problem with plants, from a profit perspective.
You cannot patent ginger. You cannot own chamomile. Nobody holds the intellectual property rights to turmeric or raspberry leaf or the thousands of other botanical medicines that have been used across human civilisations for thousands of years.
Patents are the engine of pharmaceutical profit. A company invests in developing a molecule, secures exclusive rights to it for a period of years, and charges whatever the market will bear during that window. The return on investment depends entirely on exclusivity.
Nature offers no such exclusivity. A herb that grows in soil, fed by sun and water, belongs to nobody. Its healing properties cannot be monetised in the same way. And so the incentive to research it, validate it, and promote it simply does not exist within the current commercial structure of healthcare.
This is not a new insight. Academic researchers have written about it. Herbalists have said it for generations. What is new is that enough people are now awake to it that the conversation is finally beginning to shift.
The Wisdom That Was Always There
Every major ancient civilisation built sophisticated systems of plant medicine around the female body.
Ayurvedic texts thousands of years old describe specific herbs and practices for each phase of a woman’s cycle, understanding that what the body needs during menstruation is fundamentally different from what it needs during ovulation. Traditional Chinese Medicine developed detailed frameworks for supporting female hormonal health through botanical compounds, many of which are now being validated in randomised controlled trials. Ancient African healing traditions passed knowledge of plant medicine through generations of women, community to community, mother to daughter. Shamanic lineages across cultures treated the menstrual cycle not as an inconvenience but as a source of intelligence, mapping its phases to the rhythms of nature itself.
None of this was primitive. It was the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of careful observation of the human body, particularly the female body, in relationship with the natural world.
Modern medicine did not discover that ginger reduces inflammation. It confirmed it. The knowledge was already there.
What changed was who was allowed to define what counted as knowledge.
What Happens When a Woman Reconnects
We have watched this transformation happen in real time with the women who have come to Mosha.
Women who had been told for years that their period pain was normal. Women who had been prescribed the pill at sixteen and stayed on it for a decade, losing touch entirely with the natural intelligence of their own cycle. Women who had been cycling through the same monthly suffering so long they had stopped expecting anything different.
When a woman begins to understand her cycle, really understand it, something fundamental shifts.
The confusion lifts. The unpredictability starts to make sense. She begins to recognise the patterns, to anticipate what her body will need, to support it instead of fighting it. The mood shifts stop feeling like failures and start feeling like signals. The exhaustion in her luteal phase stops feeling like weakness and starts feeling like a message worth listening to.
This is not mystical. It is biological literacy. And it is something that every woman on earth deserves to have.
This Is What Mosha Was Built to Change
At Mosha, we exist in the space where ancient wisdom meets peer-reviewed science, where devotion meets evidence, where the intelligence of the female body is finally taken seriously.
Every blend we have created was built around a specific phase of the cycle, with every ingredient chosen for a published mechanism of action. The ginger and turmeric in our Restore blend are backed by multiple systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials. The chamomile and lavender in our Calm blend have been validated in double-blind clinical studies. The raspberry leaf in our Glow blend has been assessed by the European Medicines Agency as a traditional herbal medicine for female reproductive support.
This is not alternative medicine in the dismissive sense of that phrase. It is medicine that the current system has not found profitable enough to prioritise. There is a difference.
Alongside the teas, our 30 page cycle syncing guide gives every woman the education she should have received long ago. How hormones actually work across the full 28-day cycle. What the body needs in each phase in terms of food, movement, rest, sleep, and nervous system support. How to read your own rhythms and stop working against them.
Because the goal was never just to reduce period pain, though that matters enormously.
The goal was always something bigger.
A woman who understands her body is harder to dismiss. A woman who knows her cycle is not a patient waiting to be managed. She is a human being in full relationship with her own biology, making informed choices, no longer dependent on systems that were never designed with her in mind.
The Questions Worth Asking
We want to leave you with this.
The next time you are handed a prescription for symptoms your body has been expressing for years, ask what is causing them.
The next time you are told your pain is normal, ask what normal is actually supposed to feel like.
The next time a conversation about natural health is dismissed as unscientific, ask who funded the science that replaced it.
These are not radical questions. They are the questions that intelligent, curious women ask when they decide that they deserve better answers.
You do deserve better answers. Every single one of you.
A woman who understands her own biology is where a leader is born. This is where the matriarchy grows.
Not through anger. Not through tearing anything down. But through women who know themselves so deeply, so completely, that no system can ever again convince them that their pain is normal, their power is inconvenient, or their body is something to be managed rather than honoured.
That is why we built this. That is why we are here. And that is exactly why the system we are gently, lovingly, and scientifically dismantling, does not particularly want you reading posts like this one.
Welcome to Spill The Tea.
Explore the Mosha Cha Cycle Syncing Tea Kit at mosha.co. Four phase-specific blends, a ceremonial yoni steam kit, a hand-picked crystal tea strainer, and a full 30-page cycle syncing guide. Built with intention, backed by science, made with love.
Our teas are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always consult your healthcare provider before beginning any new herbal supplement, particularly if you are pregnant, breastfeeding, or taking medication.
References
– Bekelman JE et al. Scope and impact of financial conflicts of interest in biomedical research: a systematic review. JAMA. 2003;289(4):454-465.
– Lexchin J et al. Pharmaceutical industry sponsorship and research outcome and quality: systematic review. BMJ. 2003;326:1167. PMC156458.
– Lundh A et al. The Financing of Drug Trials by Pharmaceutical Companies and Its Consequences. PMC2872821.
– Fabbri A et al. Sponsorship bias in clinical research. PubMed. PMID:23135338.
– Merz JF et al. Funding of Clinical Trials and Reported Drug Efficacy. Journal of Political Economy. 2024;132(10).
– Henschel B et al. Sex bias in pain management decisions. PNAS. 2024. doi:10.1073/pnas.2401331121
– Karp A et al. Pain in women: bridging the gender pain gap. PMC. PMC12094398.
– Samulowitz A et al. Gendered pain: a call for recognition and health equity. eClinicalMedicine / The Lancet. 2024.
– Fillingim RB. The Pain Gap: Why Women's Pain Is Undertreated. HealthyWomen / University of Florida Pain Research Center.
– Washington Post. Women's pain often is dismissed by doctors. December 2022.
– Harvard Health. The dangerous dismissal of women's pain. 2025.
– National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women's Health. Sex as a Biological Variable Policy. 2016.
– Endometriosis UK. Endometriosis Diagnosis Report 2024. Survey of 4,371 women with endometriosis in the UK.