That's the thing, there aren't "active" and "inactive" ingredients. There are webs of phytochemicals that have dynamic interactions with one another and with the human body. Reductive medicine is missing that point over and over again. It's not possible to extract single ingredients that have the same effects as the qualitative mixtures phytochemicals in plants. Not only that, interacting with the plants on a human, physical level is nurturing in and of itself. There are so many pathways for information to get into the body. I want to drink lavender tea when I'm feeling a particular kind of anxiety. The smell alone calms me. The color is soothing. The way the tea feels when I drink it is warm. I enjoy the way it tastes. The taste and smell remind me of memories and moods. It works very well. It doesn't cover "general anxiety" for me. I wouldn't offer it as a prescription to someone who tells me they have "anxiety". It works better in cases of "spiritual crisis", to help maintain a bigger picture after a death or tragedy, than it does for acute frantic, nervous feelings. In those cases, I prefer valerian, chamomile or holy basil.

You're bullshitting me if you think I'm gonna prefer to take a pill with "holy basil extract" over a delicious cup of holy basil tea. Absolutely not.

And tell me how to "extract" rooibos? What parts are you going to put into pills? Can you extract the taste? Can you extract the nutrients? Would you make one pill for the antioxidants and another for the vitamin C?

It used to be thought that THC was "the active ingredient" in cannabis. Well, it turns out that THC and CBD, along with numerous other varieties of cannabinoids, interact dynamically in the body, modulating one anothers' effects. Studies have shown that CBD quells the psychosis inducing effects of THC very well. But CBD on its own isn't necessarily a strong antipsychotic. It'd need to be taken in large doses to have that effect.

The idea that "germs cause disease" is a similar misconception. Bacterial infections are symptoms of larger ecological imbalances in the body's microbiome. Sometimes infections are really caused by antibiotics (if you wanna point fingers), as is the case with C. Difficile infections that take hold in guts whose flora have been nuked by antibiotics.