Listener: your post is a good example of where these kinds of threads go off the rails. The plural of anectode is NOT data. One data point is meaningless. According to Wikipedia there are 130 species of Scaevola. Which one is this story about?
A number of years ago I had a job taking care of research animals for the College of Pharmacy at Washington State. One of our researchers attempted independently to research laetrile as a cancer treatment. Supposedly laetrile could be manufactured from peach pits and was a cheap cure for cancer. He discovered that nobody actually knew what laetrile was. He could make "laetrile" from Yakima peach pits and Wenatchee peach pits (those are two different fruit growing areas in Washington) and end up with different chemicals.