In October 2025, something genuinely significant happened in UK healthcare, and it didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved. Alternaleaf, the UK arm of Australian medical cannabis company Montu, launched the country’s first dedicated women’s health medical cannabis service. For the 630,000 women currently sitting on NHS gynaecology waiting lists, and the millions more who have spent years dismissed, misdiagnosed, or simply ignored by a healthcare system not designed with their pain in mind, this is more than a new clinic offering. It’s a long-overdue acknowledgement that women’s health needs specialist attention.
I think the scale of the problem here deserves to be stated plainly before we get into the specifics. NHS gynaecology waiting lists have doubled since 2020. Endometriosis, a condition that affects roughly 1 in 10 women in the UK, takes an average of eight years to diagnose. Eight years. That’s not a healthcare system failing at the margins. That’s a systemic failure affecting millions of women during some of the most formative years of their lives. And perimenopause, a phase that every woman who lives long enough will experience, is still routinely dismissed in clinical settings, with women being sent away with antidepressants when what they need is actual hormonal and symptomatic support.
What Alternaleaf Is Actually Offering
The service is led by Medical Director and Pharmacist Nabila Chaudhri, and is explicitly framed around addressing what Alternaleaf calls the “gender care gap” in UK healthcare. That phrase is doing a lot of work, and rightly so. The gender care gap isn’t just about waiting times. It’s about a historical pattern in medicine where women’s pain has been underfunded, under-researched, and undervalued relative to conditions that predominantly affect men.
The conditions the service targets include endometriosis, perimenopause symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and chronic pain, and the broader cluster of women’s health complaints that have historically been inadequately served by conventional medicine. The NHS’s own endometriosis guidance acknowledges the diagnostic delays and the lack of effective treatment options for many patients. Medical cannabis isn’t presented as a cure, but for some patients it offers relief that other treatments simply haven’t provided.
Honestly, the fact that female patients at Alternaleaf grew by 50% every three months over the past year tells you something important. Women aren’t being steered towards medical cannabis by aggressive marketing. They’re finding their way to it because they’ve run out of other options, or because the other options come with side effects and waiting times that make them impractical. When cannabis became legally prescribable in the UK in November 2018, it opened a door. Alternaleaf is now trying to make that door a lot easier for women to walk through.
Why a Specialist Service Matters
You might ask why women’s health needs its own dedicated medical cannabis service rather than just being handled within a general medical cannabis clinic. It’s a fair question, and the answer comes down to both clinical complexity and cultural competence.
Women’s health conditions interact with cannabis-based medicines in ways that require specific clinical knowledge. Hormonal cycles affect how cannabis is metabolised. The relationship between endocannabinoid system function and conditions like endometriosis is an active area of research. The anxiety and mood components of perimenopause require careful clinical consideration when it comes to strain selection, dosing, and delivery method. A general cannabis prescriber might not have the depth of knowledge needed to navigate all of that safely and effectively.
There’s also the matter of how women experience the medical consultation itself. Let’s be real: many women with chronic conditions have a long history of being told their symptoms are psychosomatic, exaggerated, or “just stress.” Walking into a general medical appointment can trigger a very understandable defensive posture. A service designed specifically around women’s health creates a different kind of clinical encounter, one where the starting assumption is that the patient knows her own body and deserves to be taken seriously.
Understanding the role that calming terpenes play in improving sleep and managing anxiety, or how specific terpenes support anxiety relief, is the kind of nuanced clinical knowledge that a specialist women’s health cannabis service is better placed to apply than a generalist clinic.
The Parliamentary Dimension
Alternaleaf hasn’t just been building a clinical service. The company has also been making its case at the policy level. Their written evidence to Parliament sets out in some detail the case for medical cannabis in addressing healthcare gaps, including those specific to women’s health. This kind of engagement matters. It positions the service not as a commercial offering trying to carve out market share, but as a genuine healthcare provider making evidence-based arguments to policymakers.
I think it’s worth acknowledging that Alternaleaf being the UK arm of an Australian company adds an interesting dimension here. Australia has been further down the road of medical cannabis normalisation than the UK, and the operational experience Montu has developed there has clearly informed how the UK service has been built. There’s something slightly galling about the fact that it took an Australian company to launch the UK’s first women’s health cannabis service, but that’s a reflection of how the UK has approached medical cannabis generally, slowly and with enormous institutional reluctance, rather than anything specific to Alternaleaf.
What This Could Mean for Endometriosis Patients
Endometriosis deserves particular attention here because the gap between patient need and clinical provision is so stark. Women wait an average of eight years to get a diagnosis. Many more years can pass before they find a treatment that meaningfully controls their symptoms. The conventional toolkit includes hormonal treatments, which aren’t suitable for everyone, pain management with medications that carry their own long-term risks, and surgical intervention, which relieves symptoms but doesn’t cure the condition and carries a significant recurrence rate.
Cannabis-based medicines offer an approach that is distinct from all of these. The anti-inflammatory properties associated with certain terpenes in cannabis-based pain relief are genuinely relevant to endometriosis, which is at its core an inflammatory condition. The analgesic and anxiolytic effects can address both the physical pain and the anxiety that so often accompanies a condition that has been disbelieved and undertreated for years.
This doesn’t mean cannabis is a silver bullet. Nothing is, for endometriosis. But for patients who have exhausted conventional options, or who can’t tolerate conventional treatments, having a specialist service that understands both the condition and the medicine is a meaningful step forward.
Perimenopause: The Other Half of the Picture
Perimenopause is the other major focus of Alternaleaf’s women’s health service, and it’s arguably an even more under-served area. The perimenopausal phase can last anywhere from a few years to over a decade, and the symptom profile, which can include anxiety, depression, sleep disruption, joint pain, brain fog, and mood volatility, is wide enough that conventional medicine struggles to address it comprehensively.
Hormone replacement therapy is effective for many women, but not all women are suitable candidates, and not all women want it. For women managing perimenopausal anxiety and sleep disruption, the evidence around certain terpenes and sleep is increasingly compelling. Cannabis-based medicines prescribed within a specialist women’s health framework offer a targeted option that treats the symptom cluster rather than requiring a separate prescription for each individual complaint.
In my view, the perimenopause dimension of this service is potentially where the highest volume of patients will eventually be served. The NHS is genuinely overwhelmed by the scale of perimenopausal patient need, and the private sector has so far offered expensive consultations that remain out of reach for many women. A medical cannabis service positioned as an accessible specialist option for perimenopausal symptoms fills a gap that is both clinically real and commercially substantial.
Looking Ahead
Alternaleaf’s launch of the UK’s first dedicated women’s health cannabis service is the kind of development that looks obvious in retrospect. Of course there should be specialist services for women’s health conditions within the medical cannabis sector. Of course the gender care gap should be addressed with the same determination as any other healthcare inequality. The fact that it took until 2025 to get here says less about the clinicians involved and more about the pace at which UK healthcare, and the UK medical cannabis sector specifically, has moved.
For the growing body of cannabis research and the clinical community building around it, this service represents a maturation of the field. It’s not enough to prescribe cannabis. It has to be prescribed with genuine expertise, genuine empathy, and genuine understanding of the conditions being treated. Women’s health patients have waited long enough for that combination. This is a start.
