If you’ve found yourself feeling anxious in your 40s for the first time in your life — or your old anxiety has returned with a force you don’t recognise — you are not imagining it, and you are certainly not alone. Anxiety in perimenopause has clear, well-understood biological mechanisms. Understanding them changes everything.

Are supplements really a waste of money? As a Functional Medicine Practitioner, Juliana O'Boyle IFMCP hears this view often — and understands where it comes from. But the blanket dismissal of supplements is, in her clinical experience, doing real harm. Here she unpacks the nuance: why food alone is often not enough, how gut absorption changes everything, why medication depletions are rarely discussed, and why quality and practitioner guidance make all the difference.

Functional Herbalism brings together the systems-based thinking of functional medicine and the therapeutic wisdom of traditional herbal medicine. In this article, Juliana O'Boyle IFMCP — Functional Medicine Practitioner, Herbalist and Naturopath — explains the approach she developed over 15 years of clinical practice, and why understanding the whole person matters more than treating symptoms in isolation.