Nature is the world's original pharmacy – returning to medicine's roots could help fill drug discovery gaps

The Amazon natives know which plants they need when sick.

That’s not true. It’s only valid if they would have their area kept intact in size and biodiversity and additionally have not the slightest interaction with our overwhelming rest majority of mankind. Anything or anyone disturbing and coming into or near their area from outside and they immediately get severely sick and have just zero knowledge and possibilities to handle it.

The Amazon natives know which plants they need when sick.

There are so many benefits to plants with multiple synergistic compounds in them but everyone gets pills with only one thing in

Yes, because it is safer, compounds have a range where they are therapeutic, and another where they are toxic, if you don't even know if there is anything synergistic included in what you are taking you can get intoxicated even if you get the right dose of the compound you were trying to take.

Taking into account how much work is necessary to get analgesic from scratch in a stable dosage (not depending on countless variables that can't be controlled) aspirin is a very good deal. No need to run the risk of bleeding, seizures, etc. because the bark had an unidentified synergistic compound thanks to the specific conditions where it was collected.

Look to the Amazon!!!

P.S. "Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming as a crude extract of P. rubens.[9] Fleming's student Cecil George Paine was the first to successfully use penicillin to treat eye infection (ophthalmia neonatorum) in 1930." - Wikipedia

The two Human factors most often cited in the rise of antibiotic resistance are Big Agra squeezing a few cents more from their animals by widely and unnecessarily dosing them with antibiotics which spill into the environment, and equally negligent physicians prescribing antibiotics for inappropriate conditions just to mollify their customers. Both uses create large opportunities through natural selection for highly pathogenic organisms to adapt to these hostile agents and learn to ignore or degrade them making the agents useless in suppressing disease.

Thousands of Amazon plants with unknown medicinal properties.

Myers notes that forest dwellers in Southeast Asia use 6,500 species, while northwest Amazonians use at least 1,300 plants for medicinal purposes.

https://rainforests.mongabay.com/1007.htm

Horseshoe crabs, which are native to parts of the United States and Asia, contain a unique clotting agent in their blood that is used to make an important test reagent: Limulus Amoebocyte Lysate (LAL).

https://www.biomerieux.com/corp/en/blog/pharmaceutical-qc/what-horseshoe-crabs-have-to-do-with-vaccine-development-and-why.html

Biodiversity is only touched in the article, but it is a big factor that has new importance recently.

On one side because human activity is making countless species disappear, and if they have no current economic importance then this is not given even attention. Each of the species that goes extinct could mean a lost chance for the identification of new treatments, thanks to climate change this is only going to get worse.

On the other side countries are now much more protective of the biodiversity on their territories, so companies can no longer just go and take samples, identify new drugs and get 100% of the profits after making their own production of the organisms that produce it or develop an artificial substitute. This is very good for the countries, that now can profit from their biodiversity, and have a new interest in protecting it, but it has a negative effect on the discovery of new drugs since a company can simply judge there is no longer an appeal to to and invest billions and a lot of time and effort to identify a new compound if they are only going to get a reduced profit from it.