The Mountain in Labor and the Statin-Industrial Complex

Almost three thousand years ago, the Greek fabulist Aesop told the story of the mountain in labor. The mountain shook, and rumbled, and emitted ominous-looking clouds of black smoke, and as the local villagers looked on in horror, the earth opened up and out of the fissure jumped… a mouse.

It’s uncanny. It’s almost as if Aesop foresaw the rise of the statin industry.

Statins are a $29-billion-dollar-a-year business. One statin, Lipitor, is the best-selling drug of all time, with a whopping $140 billion in cumulative sales. And just what are we getting for this outlay?

Some Danish researchers wanted to …read more