In many cases , the right method to test medicinal properties of plants is to break them into their contituents and test each separately ? and you miss a lot by not doing so(although it is hard) ?
Yes. While most of the components of a plant will have no particular effect, the one component that you're looking for may be lost in the noise. Worse, it could be cancelled out by some other component or components. (Think of proteins which inactivate other proteins.)
