A physician's word is often taken very seriously and with little skepticism. An opinion from one or two doctors, when made in a professional office or hospital, can persuade a worried patient to take drugs with complex side-effects, or even undergo traumatic treatments such as radiation and chemotherapy. Yet, when the same doctors, with years of experience and thousands of satisfied customers, give an opinion that questions a therapy established by mainstream medicine, the mainstream media calls them irresponsible, or quacks, or even criminals.

Many doctors are highly admirable people, but they are still human beings. They all make mistakes, they all learn from them, but the really good ones are willing to admit to them.

Which brings us to Dr. Dwight Lundell. He's an experienced heart surgeon and retired Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital in Mesa, Arizona. Not so long ago, Dr. Lundell made the following statement of confession:

"We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.

I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labeled "opinion makers." Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol. The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice. It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible."

Not surprisingly, Lundell's statement regarding the medical establishment's approach to treating heart disease caused a ripple in the medical industry. It challenged the validity of statins – commonly known as cholesterol-lowering medications – such as Lipitor, Crestor, Zocor, and others.

The reason Lundell's statement created such a buzz is because statins are big business. In the United States alone, about 25% of the population takes statin medications. They cost from as little as $53 per month to more than $600. Pfizer's Lipitor went on sale in 1997 and its lifetime sales have surpassed $125 billion. AstraZeneca's Crestor was the top-selling statin in 2013, generating $5.2 billion in revenue that year alone. The statin industry is estimated at around $30 billion in sales per year. Nevertheless, in the United States, more die each year of heart disease than ever before.