We need both! Synthetics have caused countless side effects and new diseases while herbal medicines need intensive efforts to preserve before they disappear in the healthcare world run by ignorant or arrogant scientists educated and trained by Big Pharma, some are greedy.
We have tried to make the former scientific, but we don’t have the means to make it so, in our complex body full of countless entities like tissues, cells, and cell contents, especially chemicals. We are still struggling to make them comply with some manmade rules for its cellular (in vitro & in vivo) and small -animal entities. But after approval of our human clinical-trial step, we still must do exactly as our ancestors had done, subjecting patients to the trial-and-error process. We have been doing this over the past 8 decades, or more. Yet we have not learned our lessons.
The most obvious and notorious recent ones include Thalidomide in the 1950s/1960s when pregnant patients who consumed it later gave birth to seriously deformed babies (some without arms or legs). The more recent example within the past decade is Ingrezza (valbenazine) used in treating tardive dyskinesia that is caused by antipsychotic and gastrointestinal drugs. This is a typical case that belongs to the synthetic drug-therapy’s vicious cycle (VC). Just wait for another decade or two and see what side effects and new diseases Ingrezza will cause. When it was approved by the FDA in 2017, I was so naïve as to wait for the drug industry to finally recognize the VC as I had described it and start doing something to discontinue (or at least avoid) synthetic drug use. Instead, this toxic synthetic drug became the star money maker, approved by our FDA.