About a century ago J.D. Rockefeller launched a campaign to promote synthetic drugs as an alternative for herbal and natural medicine (1). There is much to be said about his invasive style of transforming the Medical Climate in the US, but that is not to topic of this article.

This article only highlights one aspect of this transformation from a herbal/natural-based medicine to one that is based on synthetic drugs. Below you can hear someone (2) describe how costly scientific procedures and test trials were introduced to prove the effectiveness of certain medicine.

This was done on synthetic drugs that could be patented and not for extracts from natural plants which could not be patented. Slow and expensive trials could only be paid for by the emerging pharmaceutical companies. Through this method the new synthetic drugs could be proven to be effective when compared to placebos (and then commercially exploited for large profits).

The other side didn’t have any money to go through all these costly scientific procedures to prove the effectiveness of natural and herbal products. Even if they would do that, they would not be able to gain any profit because they couldn’t be patented.

FOOTNOTES
(1) How Rockefeller Created the Business of Western Medicine – I will get into this topic in some future article.
(2) I came across this TED-talk through Laura Aboli’s telegram channel, which I archived in the Laura Aboli Archive (Big Pharma). I don’t know who the man is that is providing us with this interesting piece of information. If you do, please let me know (Menu-Contact).