No scientist is going to be funded by a pharma to find a natural remedy. As scientists are no longer impartial and rely on funds of the major cheeses. If a remedy was found they would prob do their best to cover it up.
I'm not going to be quite as forthright as pharnorth, but I have worked in healthcare, pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals for over a decade, and that's simply not true! There is plenty of research being done by big pharma into naturally occurring compounds, to see if old remedies have any substance behind them (many do!). For example, I worked with one company who were researching alongside indigenous populations along the Amazon to find out what their folk remedies were, and to then research whether these could be made commercial. That is of course in addition to academic research, which need not be so commercially driven.
Sure, if we suddenly found that pineapple controlled worms in sheep, there wouldn't be a direct market for that. However, you'd probably find that a pharma company would isolate the responsible molecule from within the pineapple, and either extract and purify it, or make it synthetically for sale. So actually, yes of course scientists are still interested in that sort of thing.
