Women Want to Understand Their Bodies. The Information System Is Letting Them Down..

Published: 2024  |  Perspective updated: 2025

Since I began building Nadi and researching menstrual health more deeply, one thing has surprised me more than almost anything else. Not the lack of research — though that is real. Not the workplace stigma — though that is too. What has surprised me most is how consistently women report being genuinely confused about their own bodies, and how much that confusion comes not from lack of interest but from a system that gives them contradictory, incomplete, or inaccessible information at every turn.

I have been to events, run research, conducted interviews, and spent hours reading through survey responses. The same themes come up every single time.

The knowledge gap starts early and rarely closes

Most women received some biological education about menstruation — what it is, roughly when it starts, what to do about it practically. What most did not receive was any meaningful education about the menstrual cycle as a whole: the four phases, how hormones shift throughout the month, how those shifts affect energy, focus, mood, pain, and dozens of other aspects of daily life.

This is not a small gap. The menstrual cycle is the primary biological rhythm governing roughly half the population for several decades of their lives. The fact that most people navigating that rhythm received almost no meaningful education about it is one of the more significant gaps in standard health literacy.

In the research I conducted with women across a range of ages and backgrounds, the themes that came up most consistently were:

Awareness often comes late. Many women only started genuinely understanding their cycle when trying to conceive, when facing a health crisis, or when approaching perimenopause. That is decades of navigating a system without the information to understand what is happening.

School education was incomplete. Biology covered the basics — what a period is, what happens physically. What was almost universally missing was any teaching about the whole cycle: the hormonal shifts across the four phases, what those shifts affect, how to recognise when something is genuinely wrong versus within normal variation.

Symptoms impact daily life significantly. Pain, fatigue, mood changes, and irregularity were widely reported. Many women said they track their cycles — but some still feel overwhelmed by what they observe, because they do not have a framework for interpreting it.

Workplaces are inconsistent. Some women described employers as incredibly supportive — flexible, understanding, and creating conditions where they could manage their health without having to hide it. Others described environments with no flexibility, no acknowledgement, and no possibility of honesty without professional consequence.

The misinformation problem

The information gap is not just about what women were not taught. It is also about the quality and consistency of what is available now.

I attended a women's health event in Dubai — well run, well attended, with genuinely excellent speakers — and was struck by how many questions from the audience revealed contradictory information that women had received elsewhere. On nutrition, on supplementation, on hormones, on what to expect at different life stages. Not fringe claims — mainstream advice that seemed to directly conflict with what had been shared on the same topic elsewhere.

Some of this reflects genuinely unsettled science. Women's health has been chronically underfunded in research, which means the evidence base is thinner than it should be, and what exists is more contested. Some of it reflects the speed at which health content circulates on social media — fast, decontextualised, and rarely caveated.

What women are navigating is not just a lack of information. It is an overload of contradictory information, with limited tools for knowing what to trust.

What women are actually spending

My survey responses also catalogued, in practical terms, what women are doing in the absence of adequate conventional healthcare support. The list is striking: acupuncture, reflexology, reiki, herbal teas, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, magnesium, omega-3, B complex, evening primrose, probiotics, chaste berry, nutrition support, functional medicine practitioners, yoga, heat pads, TENS machines, Myoovi devices, CBD products, and more.

Some of these have strong evidence bases. Others are less well supported. What they share is that women tried them because conventional medicine either could not help, could not be accessed, or did not take their symptoms seriously enough to offer a useful alternative.

This is not fringe behaviour. It is a reasonable response to a system that has consistently underserved this population — and an indication of the demand for better solutions.

What needs to change

The answer is not to give women more information. They already have too much, of variable quality. The answer is better, more consistent, more accessible, and more individualised information — grounded in evidence, clearly caveated where evidence is limited, and designed for real people rather than ideal patients.

There is no one-size-fits-all cycle, no single experience of menstrual health, no single solution that works for everyone. What women consistently say they want is the information and the tools to understand their own pattern — and the support to make decisions from there.

That is what Nadi is being built to provide. And it is what I believe the broader women's health ecosystem needs to keep working toward.