The selling out of American medicine

There appears to be an upsurge these days among physicians to try to stand up against the pharmaceutical industry. Unfortunately, this effort is often focused on trivial things such as drug reps and whether it is ethical or not for physicians to accept minor gifts such as pens.
This effort could only be characterized as too little, too late. The pharmaceutical industry owns American medicine. Drug reps are merely minors pawns in this game. The real "drug reps" are academic physicians, so called "thought leaders", who are bought by drug companies every year with thousands of dollars of consulting and speaking engagements. Look at any respectable restaurant in your city, and you will probably find a "drug rep" physician giving a canned lecture, prepared by the drug company, to an impressionable audience of fellow physicians. These lectures are often little more than advertisements for a drug company's product.
Besides turning academic physicians into mouthpieces for the pharmaceutical industry, big pharma sponsors most continuing medical educations efforts in medicine today. Also, medical journals are stuffed and propped up with big pharma advertisements.
There is no longer any independent thought in American medicine today - almost no lectures that are given without drug company money involved, no "education" that takes place without drug company funds and message seeping in, no drug trial undertaken without big pharma sponsorship.
Modern day American medicine has sold out to the agenda of the pharmaceutical industry.