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".
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 don't know if that counts as "publicly funded medicine", but it's certainly a publicly funded group that studies medicine.
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.
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.
(Warning: some language NSFW)
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).
You can also do the legwork yourself.
The person who makes the claim must justify it, not the readers.
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).
So are you going to insist on the same for the original claim made here, too, or is this an isolated demand for rigor?