Does Google censor pharma keyword research?

Has anyone noticed that when doing keyword research for pharma niches that the top level category gets low/zero searches despite being popular in common language? What gives?

Example: Lets say my niche was pain killers and keywords such as "best pain killers" getting 0 searches.

Not necessarily. But it's extremely difficult to rank for that. You need a lot of reputation (unless you focus a very low competence pharma keywords, which is unlikely). Most governmental organisms are favoured by the algo. But a lot of real online pharmacies are ranking for them (in fact this is one of my clients).

Did some testing, in my niche it seems to hold true but then again it is in the grey area.

Google does block the search figures from the console and my tool sources it from there so it makes sense (against AdWords T&C probably)

Checked Moz and it showed up fine but other variations had low/zero searches.