Plant Medicine for Menopause: What Science and Ancient Healing Say Actually Works

Haver’s practice does this because she finally has the hour-long appointments to interpret the data and integrate it into a long-term plan. She says that by adding just these two blood markers and a body composition scan, she picks up risks that send high-functioning women who had been “running all over town getting no help” back home with a clear, actionable path. She contrasts it with her old training that forbade ordering labs unless you could act on the result immediately; now she can act because she has the time and the relationship.

Haver details how she left a 20-year career in a high-volume Beverly Hills practice, hired a start-up (Monarch) for operational support, and opened a fee-for-service practice where she charges an annual membership and spends a full hour with each patient. She was initially terrified she couldn’t fill the time, but quickly realized it was never a problem — sitting back and listening brought out all the information she needed and more. She contrasts the constant fracture of the old system, where she was running late, afraid of harming someone from time pressure, and always choosing between her patients and her family. In the new model, she feels she can finally do the real work of medicine.

Haver acknowledges that maximum bone density is reached by age 30, so preventive messaging ideally targets younger women, but she insists it is never too late. She uses her own situation as a breast cancer survivor with a small frame to illustrate that doubling down on heavy weights, even years after diagnosis, is a concrete way to improve health span. She contrasts this with the tendency to medicalize osteoporosis risk only with pharmaceuticals, pointing out that lifting is a powerful non-pharmacologic tool.

Haver describes the typical perimenopausal woman who has been put on a sleeping pill, an anti-anxiety medication, an antidepressant, something for fibromyalgia, and something for irritable bowel — a state of polypharmacy that she says is really “musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause.” She argues that even if you go back to the same “hardware store,” you will never get milk. This is not blaming the patient but empowering them to understand that a clinician who doesn’t know the physiology cannot help, and moving on is necessary.

Haver describes a slow implosion of U.S. healthcare: reimbursement is based on RVUs (relative value units) set by “a room full of crusty dusty, mostly male, mostly surgeons,” which devalues the cognitive work of listening and diagnosis. Physicians are paid per encounter, not for time spent thinking, calling back, or reviewing labs. This led her to a moment where, as faculty, she had to sign off on charts denying care to a stage-one endometrial cancer patient because she lacked insurance. She says, “I wanted to die as faculty signing off on that chart.” After leaving, she had no business experience but started a direct-pay practice, and within the first month realized she had never felt that level of professional satisfaction consistently. Her new model lets her unearth hidden histories — abuse, eating disorders, substance issues — simply because patients feel safe enough to disclose them during unhurried visits.

Haver explains that in 1910, the early AMA, funded by Rockefeller and Carnegie, commissioned educator Abraham Flexner to evaluate medical schools. His report labeled any school teaching homeopathy, naturopathy, or accepting women and non-white students as substandard. The result: all but two Black medical schools were closed; part-time women’s medical schools disappeared, and botanical medicine was branded as dangerous. This created the “doctor as technician, patient as pathology” model that persists today. She argues that this history explains why even now, herbal medicine is dismissed as unscientific, and why the medical establishment is hostile to anything outside pharmaceuticals. She insists she’s not anti-pharma but wants to widen the toolkit.

In her new practice, Haver does a deeper dive with every menopausal patient: a lipid panel that includes Lp(a) and ApoB, plus body composition analysis to measure visceral fat and muscle mass. She says that even in her first year, high-functioning women who had been dismissed by other doctors were shocked to discover hidden cardiovascular risk. This data, combined with an unhurried history, allows her to help women plan the next three decades. She notes that many of these markers are not reimbursed in a standard insurance model, but in a membership model she can order them without pushback. She believes this diagnostic approach is so powerful that “every woman who comes to me, whether 47 or 69, there is something we can do” that they hadn’t been offered before.

Haver explains that when she was in full OB practice, she and her colleagues would tell a 42-year-old with a 2-year-old “of course you’re tired” because parenting is hard, missing that the real driver was the hormonal chaos of perimenopause crashing into postpartum endocrine shifts. She says the estrogen and progesterone plunge after delivery drops a woman straight into a decade of unpredictable highs and lows, making sleep disruption, severe mood disorders, and anxiety far worse. She laments that these women are being medicated for postpartum anxiety or depression when the root is untreated perimenopause. She now believes it’s a massive failure of the medical system that no guidelines or academic papers address this population.

She describes the upcoming book as the one she has always wanted to write. It will include recipes for simple preparations, the ethnobotanical and bench science behind common herbs, and the Flexner history of medical exclusion. She wants to reach anyone interested in healing themselves, not just women, and to push back against the idea that there is no science supporting botanical use. She emphasizes that over 30% of pharmaceuticals are plant-derived, and that this is the “great-great-great-grandchild” of traditional medicines. She’s working on it during her first year of her new practice and while on tour for her previous book.