How the system works
I understand your skepticism, but it may be partially misplaced.
No, of course drug companies are not entirely evil - but neither are they necessarily entirely benevolent - both aspect can co-exist. Let's investigate without agenda and discover which is which.
Suppose that Bloodroot and other non-patentable treatments were not a total miracle cure for all cancer, but were a cheap and effective alternative for some cancers. How would we know about it? Well, in the early stages of uncovering this effect, a small number of researchers or clinicians would be publishing interesting results, but that would be minor news until validated with expensive larger studies. Who's going to fund those studies? Following that line of thought, it would not be in the financial interest of the pharma companies and their shareholders to spend money on something which could substantially reduce profits. We're only talking about the market functioning exactly as it is intended to do here, not about evil intent or inflicting deliberate harm for no purpose. Spending shareholder money to reduce profits would not be due diligence.
IF that had happened, what would we see? No, not "lots of noise in the media and Internet" because officially it's just some unproven treatments among many, since nobody funded the formal large scale testing. All we'd likely see is a small number of people, perhaps including the original researchers, saying that there was a cheap and useful treatment which never got developed. And that's what we do see, including right here.
Does that mean it's true? Hardly! It's also possible that every proposed alternative treatment really *IS* ineffective but some researchers and patients refuse to give up hope and belief. But it does mean that the idea that "expected effects on net profits influence which treatments are allowed/supported to pass from promising to available", passes the "feasible" test, rather than being rejected out of hand.
Suggesting that people should be mad at the FDA instead is (perhaps innocently) off topic, sort of "look over there, don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain". That is, your complaints about the FDA's policies on another issue, whether valid or not, have no bearing whatsoever on the current issue, and so come across as an attempt to distract our attention from the topic at hand.
