So impressive that our friend Maryanne Demasi, PhD has been on the front lines in the statin wars for at least 10 years.

Yes, incentives matter. Pharma has bought off large swaths of the medical establishment, including doctors (“key opinion leaders”), academic centers, universities, journals (their editors and reviewers), media (through advertising payments), and of course, politicians. Dr. Jason Fung, MD has chronicled this corruption in detail.

We should also highlight the catastrophic adoption of the “evidence-based medicine” model (EBM) by the medical profession during the 1990’s which facilitated Pharma domination of medical journals with their randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of their drugs. These were exalted as the highest level of “evidence” by EBM proponents despite obvious bias introduced by funding and design, not to mention spin.

Pharma sponsored panels of “experts,” who were often their paid “key opinion leaders,” to produce clinical practice guidelines. These used the database of published Pharma trials to recommend ever-increasing levels of drug treatments for various “risk factors,” i.e. numbers (!) such as LDL cholesterol, blood pressure, glycosylated hemoglobin, rather than treating and reversing disease.

There are other malignant incentives corrupting the practice of medicine; I will refer you to @Richard Amerling, MD