Is there no pleasing you people?
One of the many institutes comprising the National Institutes of Health is the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Right there on its landing page you will see links for herbal therapies and yoga. There’s even an herb app you can download.
The budget for the NCCIH is about $130M. Maybe you think it should be more, but that’s not nothing.
Maybe your objection is to the skeptical attitude of most scientists toward natural solutions. But if the definition of natural solutions includes things like not smoking, a balanced diet, exercise, weight control – in other words, moderation in all things – then you will have a hard time finding even one scientist who rejects natural solutions.
What scientists reject – and anyone who valorizes logic and evidence counts as a scientist here – are wildly overinflated claims of therapeutic benefit by natural products.
Remember when vitamin E was the new hotness for stopping heart attacks and cancer? Numerous trials have shown no benefit. How about beta-carotene? Turns out that it (in combination with vitamin E) may actually increase deaths from lung cancer and heart disease. There have literally been hundreds, if not thousands, of studies of complementary medicine. Only a few, mostly for pain, anxiety and (interestingly) reproductive disorders, show any clear evidence of benefit.
Pharmaceutical sales in the US are about $450B annually. That’s huge. But the natural products industry is no slouch either when it comes to separating people from their money. Supplement sales are near $50B in the US and rising fast. Another $15B is spent on visits to complementary practitioners.
Pills and “natural solutions” have a lot in common, more than you might expect. Both appeal to our desire for simple solutions to complex health problems: swallow this and you will be fine. Both are big businesses. Both indulge in inflated claims for the benefits of their products. But only one of them is constrained by law to provide evidence for those claims.