Herbs and the pharmaceutical business

Whole herbs are unpatentable and therefore of no interest to multi-national pharmaceutical corporations looking to maximise profits.

With the large expenditure required to discover, test and bring to market a new drug a non-patentable substance like a whole herb will not be tested by a profit driven firm.

Instead, natural products are broken down into constituent parts, which are patentable, and these parts are then tested for medicinal effects.

Only a patentable substance will provide the manufacturer or discoverer the capacity to make a super-normal profit, due to their temporary monopoly on the product.

How large this super-normal profit is will depend on many factors including the availability of substitute drugs. If there are none the ability to price gouge is considerable.

This is why we have new chemical drugs come on the market regularly.

Patents on drugs only last 20 years after their discovery and registration and so new drugs must be invented to take over from the old to keep profits high.

This explains why we hear of new wonder drugs hitting the market. 

It's to encourage doctors and the public away from the old drugs which can now be produced genetically and sold cheaply and therefore produce little profit for the manufacturer and onto the new drug which can produce super-normal profits for the sellers and manufacturers.