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)
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".