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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

I'm pretty sure that the NIH does do studies into efficacy of plants. This was after a ten second Kagi search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3059459/. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3847409/

I don't know if that counts as "publicly funded medicine", but it's certainly a publicly funded group that studies medicine.

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.

(Warning: some language NSFW)

[0] https://youtu.be/HhGuXCuDb1U?si=zDhsb_llkkzbMEiB

I like throwing those types o. Their ear by asking them if they want alternative medicine or actual medicine.

>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.

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