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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.

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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.

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