The use of herbs once was mainstream medicine but, because there is no great profit to be made from these unpatentable wonder drugs, they have lost their status as mainstream therapies.
Examples are vincristine, vinblastine and eteoposide.
Taxol, a new experimental drug for cancer, is derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree. The fear of the cancer establishment is, of course, that people themselves would be able to treat their own cancer at least as well as the approved therapies for a tiny fraction of the cost, simply by finding the proper herb and preparing a tea or by eating the plant. For this reason millions of dollars are poured into the creation of synthetics and into the advertising necessary to convince people that laboratories can improve over nature. We will focus on only a few herbal therapies, because it is not possible in the confines of this book to cover all the herbal treatments which may be effective in cancer. Besides that, only two percent of the herbs in nature have been tested as possible cancer therapies.