Originally Posted By: Arney
Originally Posted By: paramedicpete
...NCI has a major program which as been around for many years looking for and developing treatments from natural products

Interesting. I had never heard of this agency before. However, I don't really see how it really promotes natural remedies in any significant way. These lab services are only step 1 or so of the typical "drug discovery" process. Even if some herb shows promise, it's still many years and many hundreds of millions of dollars away from being approved by the FDA as a sanctioned "cure" or "treatment", and what natural remedy company can afford that? Pretty much no one because they'd never make their money back with some non-patentable product.

Without researching further, I would suspect that an agency like this primarily serves to help discover biologically active substances or new targets for therapy, but what eventually results from that information is going to be some synthetic drug under patent protection. Not some wonderful, inexpensive natural remedy you can buy at the health food store. Pete, if you're aware of any natural products like that that came from this lab, I would love to know about it so I can tell people.

This pretty much hit the nail on the head. Most other people's replies are somewhere in the ballpark though.

Friends of mine since high school run a natural medicine company (Chisolm Biological Laboratory), and have for years. There is a good bit of scientific research out there on a good deal of natural medicines, more than most people might realize. However, good bit of it doesn't come from the US.

That's where our friends the FDA and the drug companies come in. First, for anything to be able to treat or cure a disease, it must be a drug. Which means it has to go through the FDA approval process, and whatever it is treating/curing must be a disease (that's why it seems like everything is a disease these days. Get it defined as a disease, now you can manufacture drugs to treat it). This makes it extremely hard to promote any natural remedy, since you can't say that it treats or cures anything (also why so many natural medicines are said to promote the immune response).
The large drug companies do plenty of research on natural medicines, but if they can't synthesize the active ingredients they can't patent anything. Without a patent they can't make money to cover the costs of bringing a drug to market (not to mention profit). So basically they stop research on something once they find they can't synthesize it, and they don't release their research.