There are many medicinal substances approved by the AMA/FDA that derived from herbs: foxglove, aspirin, quinine, morphine, ephedrine, lithium and you can also include things like pot, tobacco, coffee, valarien, kava kava, kratom, etc. because they all have some kind of property that addresses some form of human need that they will temporarily allieve.
I am wondering what approx. percentages of approved medicines either came directly or indirectly from and herb.
If you have any valid sources, please include them.
A significant fraction of FDA approved drugs are “natural products”: compounds found in nature that have some useful medicinal property. Some of these are found in herbs as you mention, but many others were discovered in microbes or random odd critters like marine sponges. Here’s a paper that gives a breakdown of FDA approved natural products between 1981 and 2006. In summary:
5% are unmodified natural products. Usually though these will still be chemically synthesized so they can be produced in large enough quantities. The chemically synthesized drug is identical to that extracted from the original source. There aren’t enough yew trees in the world to yield enough taxol for all the cancer patients that need it.
23% are modified natural products – they’ve got some relatively minor chemical change which improves the pharmacological properties.
14% are synthetic but in part are based on useful chemical structures found in natural products.
4% are completely synthetic but designed to mimic some other natural product.
ETA: This paper doesn’t specify the original source for each natural product – but some significant fraction of the above percentages are based on plants. If you were sufficiently motivated you could look that up for each of the listed compounds.
Indeed. But the OP was not referring to elemental lithium, because that’s not a medication. In this context lithium is shorthand for compounds such as lithium carbonate, which is a mineral.
Yeah, but that can be extended to include almost anything that makes any type of med. Primarily I am looking for things like foxglove, aspirin, quinine, etc. Something that was used traditionally for specific reasons and then later refined by science to make what we think of as medicine today.
If we’re going to pick nits, we should note that herbs don’t necessarily have medicinal qualities, either: most of the ones you’d use for cooking don’t, for example, and lots of them are just ornamental.
More nits: Valerian and kava are not “FDA-approved drugs” - they are legally marketed as supplements under the DSHEA legislation but have not gone through a drug approval process (if they had, makers of kava would have had to run large trials just to address safety, owing to concerns over liver toxicity).
Revival of this thread does provide a useful counterpoint to the argument of alt med advocates, who incessantly claim that no one in the pharma industry is interested in developing natural products because you can’t patent them.
I don’t think lithium is a naturally-occurring substance, either. The ore would all be some sort of compound of it (probably an oxide), which would need to be chemically processed in some way to get metallic lithium.