I don't think people label plants as inherently alternative medicine. Plenty of non-alternative (aka regular) medicine was originally derived from plants (e.g. aspirin).
Things typically become labeled "medicine" when they've been work and have been tested. "Alternative" kind of works like a logical `not`, so applying de Morgan's law that implies that alternative medicine either has not been tested or doesn't work.
Obviously that's a kind of reductive take, but I don't think it's fair to say that scientists label all things from "plants" as "alternative".
It's not about what people or scientists say. It's the wrong frame to think about it in.
Pharmaceuticals these days run as businesses, and its not financially beneficial for them to even quantify the medicinal qualities of chemically unprocessed plants. Because you can't build a competitive advantage around something like that. So, while they often take inspiration taken from plant based compounds, usually the essential compounds are extracted, a synthetic process developed to manufacture them, and only the medical properties of the resultant product studied via trials.
It would do well for publicly funded medicine to reserve some funding for quantifying the medicinal properties of plants used directly.
USA's FDA is notorious for not finding therapeutical effect in plant medicines. The same plants which have been in use for 100s years in ex-USSR and Germany. USSR's pharma was relatively prudent and would not peddle non-working solutions for New Age reasons.
The articles I posted were for the NIH, not the FDA. They are two separate organizations, with admittedly some overlap, but still distinct.
The NIH researches lots of potential health claims and will publish their data as well. The stuff I linked was two examples that I found in like ten seconds, but there’s tons more. The NIH is much more of a research organization than regulatory, unlike the FDA.
I just felt it prudent because the person I was responding to was lamenting about not having a publicly funded research body to investigate potential health benefits for plants that is simply untrue in the US.
My first thought on reading this was of Tim Minchin's epic beat poem 'Storm' [0] - jump to 3:05 if you want to hear the bit that specifically deals with this.
>Things typically become labeled "medicine" when they've been work and have been tested
Eh, sometimes. But often things labeled "medicine" are things that companies can get FDA approval for, patent, manufacture, ensure shelf stability, label with a brand, and sell to customers at a high margin. There are lots of plants that are proven to work but aren't sold to customers because they can't meet some of those criteria. They aren't necessarily worse, just can't be be sold at scale profitably.
I don't know why your comment was dead/flagged, what you're saying isn't a new thing at all. If anyone's interested in similar things look up patent evergreening. As someone using life-saving drugs that are patented despite the creators of the said drug selling the rights for a dollar to prevent pharmaceutical capture, this stuff is irritating at best and deadly at worst.
My uninformed opinion is that anything which hasn't been distilled into a single compound won't be called medicine by the medical industry. How they manage to study those that are only beneficial when converging with other compounds, I have no idea.
I have some background in pharmacology, particularly psychopharmacology and I can tell you that it's not even remotely true. There's so much studies out there... so, what kind of studies were you reading?
For example - Rapamycin/sirolimus, ephedrine, morphine, antibiotics (e.g. penicillins, cephalosporins), psilocin and psilocybin, are the first naturally occuring (in significant quantities) that came to my mind when thinking about some. Neither of these were studied only in any combination drugs (FDCs). And a lot of close derivatives of naturally occuring substances, like aspirin. This could be really a huge list (of both).
Was the claim I was responding to justified anyhow, though?
It's literally one query to https://scholar.google.com or any other search engine of choice, should I link to search results? Okay, so append ?q=[substance name] at the end of the URL. I don't mean to come off as rude, though. But it's really simple to do so, and it won't really serve any purpose to link to particular studies, either, as this could in turn add a potentially huge selection bias.
By the way, for more "obscure" in terms of scientific interest compounds see: beberine, theanine (aka l-theanine), vinpocetine. Particularly the last one. Same. These ones don't even have any synthetic counterparts which will share same or similar mechanism of action (there are other synthetic compounds targeting the same receptors, but they still represent very unique combinations of targets and also often have unique pharmacodynamics in relation to these targets).
