"A full 40 percent of the drugs behind the pharmacist’s counter in the Western world are derived from plants that people have used for centuries, including the top 20 best selling prescription drugs in the United States today. For example, quinine extracted from the bark of the South American cinchona tree (Cinchona calisaya) relieves malaria, and licorice root (Glycyrrhiza glabra) has been an ingredient in cough drops for more than 3,500 years."
https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/ethnobotany/medicinal/inde...
(I'm aware of the sarcasm tag). Technically that 100% should be 99.999%. Not all drugs are found in nature. Technetium, a man-made compound, is used in some radiology.
https://go.drugbank.com/categories/DBCAT001978
No, technetium is still a natural product, it just takes a little processing. An organic miner dug up some raw uranium ore, then someone refined it, irradiated it, and isolated the resulting molybdenum-99, and finally a radiologist extracts the all-natural technetium from the decay process of that molybdenum.
Medical errors are the third leading cause of death. We like to imagine we’ve come a long way from treating ghosts in your blood with cocaine, but we haven’t.
"we shouldn't dismiss" means we should try them and see if they work, not just automatically assume they work or automatically dismiss them as snake oil.