How Did We Go From Herbal Medicine to Prescription Pads
A short history they never taught you—and why it matters.
They teach you about the "miracle of modern medicine."
But they rarely tell you what came before it.
And they never tell you why it was replaced.
Because once you start asking those questions,
you start seeing the whole game differently.
Herbs Were Here First
For thousands of years, civilizations used the Earth as their medicine cabinet:
• Willow bark (the original aspirin)
• Moldy bread (an early form of penicillin)
• Turmeric, ginger, garlic—used long before clinical trials even existed
No one needed a prescription.
No one asked a board of directors.
They just… healed.
Enter the Rockefellers: A Shift in Power, Not Just Medicine
In the early 1900s, John D. Rockefeller—oil tycoon turned medical mogul—saw something in medicine: Profit.
He began funding schools and research institutions—but only if they followed his new chemical-drug model.
Plants didn’t make money. Patents did.
So herbal medicine was labeled “quackery,”
and natural healers were pushed out in favor of white coats and pharma-funded protocols.
Look up the Flexner Report (1910) if you want to see how the system was rewritten.
The Birth of the Prescription Pad—and the Death of Root Cause
By mid-century, we weren’t asking why someone was sick.
We were asking what drug they should take.
One symptom, one pill.
And if the pill causes another issue?
No problem—another pill.
This wasn’t healing. It was management.
And now? We have 4-year-olds on psych meds, and 40 somethings on five prescriptions a day.
Why This History Still Matters
Because what you don’t know can hurt you.
When a system wipes out 5,000 years of plant wisdom in a single century—and replaces it with side effects and scripts—you have to ask:
• Was this really about health?
• Or was it about control?
• What healing have we been cut off from—and why?
They didn’t evolve past herbal medicine.
They erased it. On purpose.
Now the question is:
Will you go looking for what they tried to bury?