The Tucker Carlson Show - Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Episode Date: February 28, 2025Dr. Richard Bosshardt has been a board certified surgeon for nearly 40 years. He’s watched the DEI race crazies lower the standards to such a frightening degree that he no longer trusts doctors. (0...0:00) Bosshardt’s War on DEI Within the Medical Industry (04:47) The Left’s Mission to Segregate Surgeons (11:03) Why They Banned Bosshardt From the American College of Surgeons (24:41) How the Left Has Criminally Lowered the Standards for Surgeons (33:00) The Next Generation of Surgeons Is Doomed Paid partnerships with: Eight Sleep: Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://EightSleep.com/Tucker Jase Medical: Promo code “Tucker” for extra discount at https://Jasemedical.com Hallow prayer app: Get 3 months free at https://Hallow.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Conditions apply. Visit your GTA Volvo retailer or go to volvocars.ca for full details. So let me ask you, you, 2022, became famous for a day or two because you got into it with the American College of Surgeons? I'm still into it with them, yes.
You're still into it with them?
It's approaching its third year.
Its third year. Can you just
give us a quick reminder of
what that concertomp was about, what happened?
Sure.
I am a surgeon.
I'm a plastic surgeon, but I was
a general surgeon for a while.
One of the things that I did after
I became a surgeon
was to apply for fellowship in the American College of Surgeons, which is an honorary sort of a thing to have attached to yourself.
If you become a fellow, you're allowed to put the letters FACS after your name.
And something I sought to do.
So, I became a fellow on the ACS, American College of Surgeons, and went along for 30 plus years as a practicing surgeon doing my thing.
And then what happened was, in and around 2018, 2019, you could say I woke up.
I realized that there was something going on in my area of surgery. And it began with a transcript of a lecture by an invited lecturer to the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress that they have every year.
The lecture was titled, A Pathway to Diversity, Inclusion, and Excellence.
That was the title of the lecture.
And for reasons that I can't explain, I read it.
I wouldn't normally have done that, but I read the entire transcript. I read twice,
and not once was excellence mentioned in there. And so I wrote a commentary that was actually
published in the bulletin of the ACS, where I expressed some concerns about taking down excellence as the primary directive for surgery, for surgeons,
and replacing it with diversity, inclusion.
At that time, the equity, they didn't throw that in there.
And that commentary didn't really do much.
So fast forward a couple of years, and you have COVID, which, you know, its own thing.
And then you have the George Floyd
killing. And I think you could realistically say that the country went crazy after George Floyd.
I mean, everything from riots and whatnot to this mass movement to adopt the idea that
the country was systemically racist, and every institution, every organization was racist, and we had to radically transform the country. And the American College of Surgeons was
no different. They jumped right on that bandwagon. And within weeks after the George Floyd killing,
I mean, literally weeks, they had assembled a task force on racism. And they published this
in the Bulletin, which is their quarterly newsletter.
And the Bulletin basically said that they were doing this to deal with racism in the ACS.
It wasn't like, is there racism in the ACS? It was, there is racism, and we need to ferret it out. Like refusing to operate on black people?
Not, that would be pretty extreme.
No, I'm joking.
I mean, like, where was the racism in surgery?
It's almost as bad, Tucker.
The idea is that, well, let me take that step.
They claim that surgeons were racist, that the ACS itself was racist, and that the practice of surgery was racist.
And the reason why they made that last claim was because there are known disparities.
We know that the outcomes for surgery are not as good statistically for,
we'll just call it black and white because it just makes it easier to deal with that,
that it's not as good for blacks as it is for whites.
And so the idea is that there's some element of racism or discrimination that impacts the outcome of surgery.
And of course, if you take that to the next step,
it means that, you know, blacks are not getting as good care.
Their surgery is not being as done as well and whatever.
There's a whole lot of reasons why you can have disparate outcomes.
That this was the one reason that they latched onto,
and they have never let go.
And then, have you heard of the term racial concordance?
No.
Okay, that's a really important concept.
And this is something that's being promoted by the ACS.
The ACS has explicitly stated that blacks would do better
if their surgeon is black.
As simple as that.
That's a racial concordance,
that you are going to receive better care by a doctor,
surgeon or other doctor,
if they are of your same race, ethnicity, gender,
that you might get better care, pardon me,
better care if you're a woman by a female surgeon, for example.
And they've hung on to that as well.
So that was the idea behind segregation in the South, of course.
Well, that's the whole thing.
They're trying to redo that.
People should stick with their own, yeah.
They're trying to reinstall segregation into surgery, which, when you think about it, is
a pretty despicable thing to do.
So I get a white male surgeon, is what you're saying?
Exactly.
Okay.
Well, you might need to get a white male surgeon of whatever your, I think, heritage is.
Kind of happy with a Swedish surgeon.
I feel like I'm going to win
in this. I need a Brazilian one because
my mother is Brazilian.
Meaning German, by the way.
Well, I'm half German, half Brazilian. There you go.
So,
what happened was this.
The task force came out with the recommendations
at the end of 2020.
And the recommendations were, oh my gosh, I mean, it's just a litany.
It was basically a playbook for how to instill DEI.
They still weren't really calling it DEI that often.
They were calling it anti-racism still.
And that term kind of fell out of favor, and then DEI became the nice, the more acceptable
term for adopting critical theory, critical race theory into surgery. So, the recommendations were
to add anti-racism, Abraham Kennedy's anti-racism, into the ACS as the value of the ACS. They opened
up a branded department of diversity, which had not existed before, and this is what they call a
regental department, meaning that the head of that department, the clinical director, was now one of
the members of the board of regents, had its own clinical director, its own executive director.
They installed all these initiatives. They started training their staff and even the leadership on things like microaggressions, implicit bias, ally and active bystander, white privilege.
And when I saw this, this is when I guess it really hit me.
I never thought I would be doing this at this point in my career.
I'm retired.
I'm three months retired from 38 years
as a surgeon. And to be an activist was never on my radar. But I couldn't let this stand. It just
really bothered me. I mean, I ask you to just go back to the core assumptions that drive this.
Are they rooted in science? Absolutely not. Okay. So, is there any research at all that shows that the outcomes in surgery are better
when the surgeon is matched racially with the patient? Absolutely. Do No Harm, the organization
that I joined as a result of this whole issue, has actually published. You can go online and you can read it.
They've done a systematic study.
Well, actually, they've looked at five systematic studies of this issue. Does racial concordance, does concordance of ethnicity and race and so forth correlate to better outcomes in surgery?
Short answer is no. There's no scientific evidence
that having a surgeon of your own race
will provide better outcomes.
Has there ever been evidence?
No.
So, I mean, just to ask a dumb question.
Well, let me qualify that.
There was a study put out
that's been repeatedly referred to.
I mean, even today it's been completely discredited.
But a study showed that the survival rates for black babies is better if they have a black
doctor, whether obstetrician or whatever, than if it's not. And so they keep repeatedly referring
to the study. But if you look at the study, the study design is terribly flawed. The reviewer,
if you're familiar with Vinay Prasad, who is a data geek and very good at parsing
clinical studies and so forth, came out to this study as catastrophically flawed.
And even though this study does not by any stretch show that this is the case, it's still referred to as the primary evidence
for this idea that racial concordance is a real thing.
And it's still in the ACS.
Was there any push to make certain
that white patients got white doctors?
When you say a push, but push by whom? I'm just being perverse. Like,
did they really believe it when they said this? They didn't really believe it. This is just a
way to lower the standards to change the racial composition of surgeons, right? I think the only
thing that's pushing this is ideology. I think if you're really science-based, you know, if you
follow the science as the saying goes, if you look at that, you can't possibly believe that.
So either you have an ideology that supersedes, you know, factual science.
Yes.
Or you're clueless and you're following whoever it is that's taking the lead on this.
And who was taking the lead in the American College of Surgeons?
I can't give you names. I
could probably name a few people that I know that were instrumental in pushing against me, pushing
back. But I think it's a very small vocal group of very, very committed anti-racist or DEI zealots. And I think the others have gone
wrong. I think some
members of the ACS
have really not
researched this to the extent they understand
it, and they kind of go wrong. Because it sounds
you know, DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion,
sounds wonderful. Who would not be for
those two things? Are those the rules in surgery? Like
if the other kids are for it, you just do it?
You'd think not.
You would think not, yes.
That's the thing that was so disconcerting to me.
Let me carry the story just a step further down the road.
I wrote to the president of the ACS, and I expressed my concerns.
And I'm a writer.
Talking is not my thing, but I love to write.
And I wrote a three-page single-spaced letter
in which I outlined my concerns.
Never got a response from that.
And so the next thing I did was I actually posted
the ACS of the website, of course,
and they have a thing called the Communities,
which is a forum for surgeons to communicate with one another.
If you have a question, you can pose it, and surgeons will weigh in and provide advice or answers.
If you have something on a topic you want to discuss, do the same thing.
So the largest forum is the General Surgery Forum.
And so I posted on that forum basically that I was concerned about this rush to embrace anti-racism, DEI, and the ACS.
And if this continued, I didn't see how I could maintain my fellowship.
I would drop my membership in the ACS, which is something I never imagined I would do because I've
been a proud member of the ACS for over 30 years. And I'm not here to bash the ACS. I want to be
very clear about that. I'm still FACS. I'm still a fellow. They consider me a fellow, even though
I'm permanently banned, which is kind of an interesting situation to be in.
And so I posted this thing saying that I would leave the ACS if this continued.
And that generated a comment thread.
And if you're familiar with comment threads, if you look at the engagement in the comment thread,
usually it's only about 1% to 10% of people that are reading the comment thread that actually engage. because that's just the nature of things.
That comment thread ran for four months and 75 individual surgeons and over a thousand comments.
It broke the system basically. I mean, they had to open up a second comment thread because they'd
never had this much engagement on anything. And two-thirds of the surgeons that engaged weighed in favor of my position as opposed
to the ACS. And they kept saying, why are we doing this? Tell me where the racism is. Let's deal with
the racism, but don't just call us racist and go with that. And they repeatedly refused to do that.
So, who is they?
This is the leadership of the ACS. And this is my, my beef is not with the ACS, with my fellow surgeons. My beef is with the leadership of the ACS. And this is my beef is not with the ACS, with my fellow surgeons.
My beef is with the leadership of the ACS.
It might be interesting just to hear if you can recall some of the names of the leadership who did that just for the record.
I don't have any problem because it's public record.
The general secretary was a fellow named Tyler Hughes, just retired.
Tyler Hughes.
Yeah, general surgeon.
And he was the editor-in-chief of the communities.
So he was kind of moderating. And he would weigh in sometimes if it seemed like surgeons were getting a little bit too heated and so forth. And my position was, we're professionals. Surgeons are opinionated. We're not shrinking violets. We state our case. We're certainly qualified to have conversations without a chaperone. And I didn't really like the
whole chaperoning thing that was going on. And so this went forward. And as common threads do,
it kind of ran its life expectancy really beyond what you'd think for months. At which point,
I was thinking, okay, so I did that. What do I do now? And I was waiting to see what my next step
would be when the ACS leadership, the Board of
Regents, reached out to me. Tyler Hughes reached out to me and said, we'd like to have you on a
Zoom call. This was going to happen in 2022. They wanted to wait a little bit. It wasn't until March
because they were bringing on board their new Director of Diversity, a doctor named Bonnie
Mason, who is their clinical director of diversity.
And so the Zoom call consisted of myself
and Tyler Hughes and Bonnie Mason
and a regent of the ACS,
a member of the board of regents named Tim Emberlein,
who is a very well-known, prominent surgeon
in a big institution.
And I had joined a group called FAIR,
F-A-I-R, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism,
and I helped found FAIR in medicine,
which has been working,
kind of like doing no harm in the area of DEI medicine,
and so I went to some of my colleagues in FAIR
and said, hey, listen, I'm invited to this Zoom call.
How do you think I should prepare for this?
And the first thing they said is,
don't go by yourself
because you're going to get jumped on.
I said, okay,
that sounds like a reasonable piece of advice.
So I invited a colleague of mine
who's a surgeon I worked with for 30 years.
Her name is Celia Nelson.
Celia is a Jamaican-born black female general surgeon,
which is unusual.
She's definitely in the minority on the ACS.
And she came on the call.
So it was five of us on the call.
Very, very civil conversation, well over an hour.
We each stated our positions.
I stated my concerns.
She expressed the same concerns that I did
from her standpoint as a woman, a black woman surgeon.
And I left so encouraged from that.
I said, wow, this is great.
We got a dialogue.
And this is what I wanted, a dialogue.
And I sent an email to everyone that was on the Zoom call and said, thank you so much. I hope this will be the start of a conversation where we can discuss these things. And a few weeks
later, I couldn't get on the communities anymore. I tried to get on the website and get on the
communities and I couldn't get on. And I thought, okay, there's some glitch here. I think maybe it
was on the site had a problem. I waited, and I waited pretty close to a couple of weeks before I finally said, I contacted Tyler Hughes and said, Tyler, what's going on? I can't get on the communities. And in addition, you're banned from access to the member directory of the ACS
and you're banned
from your own private voicemail box.
So it was a total,
total isolation.
And I said, why?
Why am I being banned?
And the answer was
because if you're continuous,
and I'm basically quoting,
your continuous use
of disrespectful language
and persistent posting of non-clinical material on clinical forums.
So the thing was I was being disrespectful, which I have disputed, and I can prove I wasn't.
And my non-clinical material was posting this issue of DEI on the clinical forums.
They brought up in the first place. That they, well, and what's interesting is this,
they're the ones saying that clinical outcomes in surgery are being impacted, you know, adversely for minorities. But I mean, you were a, I mean, you spent over 30 years just being a surgeon,
cutting and healing people. Right. You're not the one who brought this topic into the ACS in the
first place. They did. Yeah. Yeah. But because you discussed a topic that they introduced, they said you weren't a serious doctor and needed to be banned.
I was disruptive and I was being disrespectful.
And so I did ask.
I said, can you please show me a single example of anything that I have said at any time that justifies this ban?
And they have never done that.
I've asked several times.
They've refused every single time.
So I appealed.
I went to the Board of Regents and appealed, and I said, you know, this is wrong.
And they came back and said, we reviewed this, and we uphold the ban, and this is interesting.
They said, and we feel that you have received due process.
Well, due process means that they're saying it went through the proper
channels in the ACS. Well, the channels are there's a fixed process for disciplining a surgeon.
You have to be informed that you're being investigated for some issue. That has to go
to their central judiciary committee, which is empowered to investigate their members, they decide if there's
merit to this, you know, allegation. And if there is, they send it back to the Board of Regents,
who then has to, you know, does the punishment, whatever that may be. Could be expelled, could be
whatever. They never did that. It never went to the Judiciary Committee. They never informed me that I was being investigated for a possible lifetime ban. As a member of the ACS, I am entitled, my privileges include the right to having a hearing. If I'm looking at being disciplined by my organization, I have a right to have a hearing to defend myself, and they denied me that hearing. And the reason, it's like a catch-22.
It didn't go through the Central Judiciary Committee.
Therefore, I don't deserve a hearing.
The gaslighting is unbelievable, Tucker.
It's just unbelievable.
So I exhausted every avenue I had to address this with the ACS internally.
And that's when I went public.
And that's when I wrote my article to the Wall Street Journal.
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apply visit bmo.com slash vi porter to learn more i wanted to hear more about it not simply because
you're the victim of grotesque injustice and authoritarianism, but because
the consequences of this kind of thinking are so dangerous to the public health that I think
people need to know. Because everything you're saying suggests that they're going to radically
lower the standard for surgeons. Not that they are, they have. They have. That's, that's...
So how is that not a felony?
How can you do that?
How can you lower the standard for surgeons or air traffic controllers or anyone who's got a job with the public health in his hands?
You know, a critical job, the critical jobs in our society, and you lower the standards for that?
That's not a crime?
I think the way you do it is you do it really slowly over a long period of time.
And no one really notices until it gets to that.
Until people die.
Well, until...
That's an interesting thing you say there.
You work with a knife in your hand.
I mean, this is like the highest level of trust.
You're saying to somebody, I'm going to let you cut me open.
Who would you say that to?
Only a surgeon.
And so the consequences are just beyond.
If there was ever a field, you know, people talk about airline pilots, sure. If there was ever a
field where excellence is a sine qua non of the field, it has to be medicine. And even beyond
that, it has to be surgery. Exactly. Because, you know, when you're the guy with a knife in your
hand, first off, you know, if you're a decent human being, you want to feel
like you are competent and doing the best
you can for your patient.
I apologize, by the way,
for putting you on the spot when we spoke.
Remember I asked you a question,
I said, what's the most important thing you look for in a surgeon?
And you said excellence.
Which was exactly right, but I wasn't looking
for excellence, I was looking for trust.
You have to trust... One flows from the for trust you have to trust well one flows
from the other
you have to trust
your surgeon
and if you are wondering
if you're going to get
the best care
because your surgeon
looks different
than you do
right off the bat
you're starting handicapped
I mean you're really
you know
hurting yourself
and the patient
if you can't
can't get that trust
pretty quickly
because when you walk
into the ER
you don't have a lot
of time to connect.
You can't be doing those nice social things.
So my ban remains in place.
I'm still banned.
The ACS will not engage with me.
They have not engaged with you in three years?
Oh, no, not at all.
Not at all.
They refuse.
I've written multiple letters.
I wrote letters to the last two presidents.
I never get an answer back.
I wrote letters.
Well, I would just encourage anyone watching to,
let's Google these people
and do not accept medical care from them.
I don't want to be cut by an unreasonable ideologue.
Problem is, you don't know who those ideologues are unless you start naming them.
It would be nice to have their names.
So you said, not only do they plan to lower standards, but they already have.
Can you tell us what you mean?
In fact, I'm delighted you said that because I don't want this to be about me.
Yeah, I'm the one sitting in front of the microphone.
I'm the one that was banned. But the issue is so far beyond me. In my 38 years of surgery, I have gradually
watched the quality of training in young surgeons deteriorate. Noticeably, in my own little
backyard, watching young surgeons come out that have no
business operating by themselves. You've seen that? I've seen that. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I can give you some examples. Please do. I had a young, this was actually a few years back,
I had a new surgeon in town at a hospital that I worked at. I do breast reconstruction, so I work a lot with the surgeons.
Together, they'll remove the cancerous breast.
Sometimes, a lot of times, they'll remove the other breast simultaneously.
And then I will come in and do the reconstruction.
And I was doing a lot of these cases where you take the abdominal tissue and you create one or two breasts with the abdominal tissue,
which is a great procedure,
but very significant, time-consuming, and whatnot.
And there's a lot of things that have to be done.
And this surgeon offered to help me close
the abdominal part of the operation,
or to do it for me,
so that I could concentrate on the breath.
I said, great.
This probably cut an hour and a half or two hours
out of my operating time.
And so I glanced down to see what he was doing.
And he's taking these massive bites of tissue.
And every time he ties a stitch down, I mean, the abdominal wall is being distorted.
I'm looking at him thinking, wow.
And I was able to, I couldn't watch more than two or three stitches put in.
And I said, you know, Joe, listen,
you got things to do, you know, go ahead.
I'm fine.
I don't need the help.
And he left.
And-
Was this someone who's out of medical school?
This is a fully trained surgeon,
just newly, just opened a practice in my community.
And he didn't last very long.
It became very obvious soon because in small hospitals, you can't hide, that he was not very competent.
And he eventually moved on.
I don't know where he went or what he did.
But it was obvious to you just from looking down, this guy was not qualified.
This guy had no clue how to close an abdomen.
I mean, it was really bizarre.
And that's kind of an extreme example.
How did he become a surgeon?
That's the thing. Lowered standards, basically.
Was this person from a protected racial group?
No. No, he was not. He was your heteronormative white male like me, basically.
But he was incompetent.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I only saw this one example. But, you know, the thing speaks for itself. If a person is doing this in such a simple situation, such as closing an abdominal wall, then you've got to wonder what he's like.
And I've worked with other surgeons that were, you know, there's a couple that I refuse to work with that were so bad that, you know, you often have to ask yourself, is it something that I report?
I don't report.
I've spoken to colleagues and so forth.
I've only actually reported one or two doctors in my career
because the circumstances are so egregious.
And these didn't happen to be surgeons, by the way.
But kind of getting off track a little bit.
I work with a young surgeon, arguably a good surgeon, and I was doing, again,
a breast reconstruction, and he made a comment to me that I found astounding. One of the common
accompanying things you do in breast cancer treatment is a lot of times you go after lymph
nodes in the armpit because you want to see if there's cancer there, or if there's cancer there,
you want to remove the cancer. And that's called an axillary node dissection.
Yes.
Basic operation.
Even I know about it.
Every general surgeon learns that.
Yes.
And we were doing a case, and he was doing a biopsy in the armpit, removing a single lymph node.
And he commented, he says, you know, I'm really glad I don't have to do an axillary node dissection, because I've never done one before.
And this is a fully trained, board-certified general surgeon. Had never done an axillary no dissection
in the course of his five years of general surgery training. Let me stick back a second to
when you ask about quality and how it's gone down. It's not a conscious thing. It's not been
deliberate. I don't think that we have gone out deliberately to create a decline in the quality of surgery.
I think a lot of circumstances have come together to do that.
One was in 2003, the American Graduate Medical Education.
They came out and they took a law that was basically confined to New York from 1964 and made it nationwide.
And that law was a reduction of residency hours.
In other words, you can't take a trainee in any medical specialty
and make them work more than 80 hours a week or more than 24 hours at a stretch.
And so that reduced residency hours dramatically because when I trained,
it was not uncommon to work a 90 to 110 hour week.
That was pretty typical. And be on call, you know, 36 hours straight. I once worked 48 hours straight.
Not that that's a great thing, but you know, you do what you have to do and you learn. You learn
to operate under circumstances when you're tired and things like that. And the idea was to reduce
medical errors and things like that, which has been disproven.
Studies have shown that that reduction in hours did nothing to improve medical errors.
But that was one thing that cut back the hours for training and surgery.
You know, you have a very limited—
What was the motive there?
The idea behind it, the reason that it occurred was because of a death.
A young woman died in New York because of a medical drug error, a very rare drug reaction.
And her father happened to be a very prominent attorney.
And he decided that the reason was that these residents were working too hard, they were too tired, and we needed to change that. And there was this spate of New York Times stories about this.
Yeah.
I remember this.
Yeah.
And that was only confined to New York until 2003.
Then it became a nationwide thing.
General surgery is a five-year residency program.
Okay.
In the first two years, you learn patient care.
You learn how to take care of patients before and after.
You assist in
operations. You do diagnostic, differential diagnosis, and you learn how to work up a
problem. And if you're good, if you're a good intern, if you're a good first year,
second year resident, they throw your bone on again. They'll let you do a hernia, and they'll
let you do an appendectomy, and they hold your hand while you do it. And then in the third and fourth years, you start to operate more, but you're always operating under
the direct supervision of a senior resident or an attending, attending a fully trained surgeon.
And again, you're having your hands held. I mean, they have to let you work. They got to put the
knife in your hand, but they have to be good enough to do that
and keep you out of trouble.
And if you get in trouble, to get you out of trouble.
And so you spend those three to four years
kind of honing your skills.
And then in the fifth year,
when you are what we call a chief resident,
you're basically regarded as being a surgeon.
And you do your cases,
you assist the younger surgeons in their cases.
And the only time you call the younger surgeons in their cases.
And the only time you call an attending surgeon in is if you're doing something very major, very complex, or if you haven't done this before.
And so at the end of that fifth year, you should be able to walk out of the hospital and go anywhere and operate as a general surgeon and function fully independently. A study done in 2014 in the Annals of Surgery reported that 80%
of the graduating general surgeons
were not going into practice. They were going on to do
a fellowship. Fellowship is additional. 80%? 80%.
Fellowships and whatever. Thoracic surgery,
vascular surgery, colorectal, you name it.
And
that was in 2014.
They surveyed
program directors.
These are the chiefs, the heads of surgical
programs to find out
what these residents,
what these surgeons that they were getting,
what these surgeons that they were getting in Phillips were like,
they found that that 66% of them could not be relied upon to operate independently for more than about 30 minutes.
That something like 30% or so could not handle tissues in a manner that was appropriate, atraumatically, if you will.
20-30% couldn't sew properly.
Close to the same number couldn't identify the early signs of a complication.
Some could not identify an anatomical tissue plane.
These are people that are graduates of general surgery residencies
coming out of these programs and going to fellowships. The saddest thing is that when
they survey the young surgeons themselves and say, well, why are you going into this fellowship
instead of going out and practicing? More than half say it's because they did not feel comfortable
operating independently after five years of training. So there's something very
wrong with the training they're getting. They're not getting enough cases to do. They're not being
allowed to operate. In some places, the attending surgeons are very hesitant to hand over a case to
a younger surgeon because, number one, they're responsible for that case. Number two, you're never going to be as efficient or fast as a young surgeon as you will later
on when you've had more experience.
So it takes longer and it impacts your day, your schedule.
It's sad because they recognize this.
I mean, these young surgeons recognize this.
So the question is, I mean, it sounds like a total failure to train the next generation of surgeons.
It's a system failure.
And the ACS recognizes this.
And you know how I know that?
It's because since 2014, they've initiated what they call a mentorship program.
And what they do is they try to find experienced surgeons that will mentor these young surgeons to help them come up to speed.
Okay, so a young surgeon out of training that should be able to work on their own and finds that they're struggling or not really able to do that,
they would have an experienced surgeon to, I don't want to say hold their hand, but to oversee them, supervise them, scrub with them.
They can't find enough surgeons to do that, for one thing.
Here's where the DEI really comes in, too,
is they have this idea of racial concordance
that what they need to do is find,
if it's a black surgeon,
they've got to find a black mentor for him.
And if it's a Hispanic surgeon,
they've got to find a Hispanic mentor.
And there's not enough of those to go around.
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failures of medical schools to train the next generation of surgeons, and can I just say
parenthetically, I feel like if they're not training surgeons adequately, you know, surgeons
are a small percentage of all physicians, probably the most important, but they're probably not, and probably the smartest and most driven, then they're probably failing.
I'll agree with you on that.
Yeah, yeah.
They're surgeons, right?
It's the most straightforward kind of medicine. they overlay these racial mandates they decide that racism is the real problem not incompetence
and then they put these mandates in where like you have to
somehow have doctors of all these different backgrounds which you don't have so what happens
when everything starts to go downhill really quickly.
I have...
People contact me just because my profile has been elevated by being out there a little bit.
I got a call from a young plastic surgery resident that had been fully trained in general surgery
and went on to begin her plastic surgery training.
And she was concerned because she wanted to get the most out of her training.
And so she reached out to me to find out what things she could do.
She told me things that were unbelievable.
I mean, I never imagined these things.
And this has been confirmed.
It wasn't just my conversation with her.
I've confirmed it from other sources as well.
A couple of things.
One is she talked about the difficulty getting enough cases under your belt.
That is, you know, not getting given cases to do, not having operations that you can actually perform, not having the attendings turn things over to you.
This I could not believe. One of the requisites to become board certified, at least in surgery, is you have to turn over to the board of examiners for the American Board of Surgery, the American Board of Plastic Surgery, a log of the cases you have done in the course of your residency program.
So, they list every case you've done to the surgeon as an assistant and whatnot.
Well, they're now permitted to list operations in there as part of the surgical experience that they've only watched.
So, if they sit behind the anesthesia screen or look over the shoulder of the surgeon and watch an operation, they can list that in the logbook as part of their surgical experience.
And I can tell you personally that you don't learn surgery that way.
You learn it by getting your hands in there.
I've watched a lot of medical shows.
I'm not a doctor as a result.
And that's what's scary.
And that allows them to qualify
for taking their boards.
The other thing they do, which is really...
What would be, again, the motive there?
Why would you allow that?
Well, the ACS has already anticipated there's going to be a shortage of 19,000 surgeons by 2030.
Five years from now, we're going to be shying nearly 20,000 surgeons in this country.
Right now, the USA is short 1,200 trauma surgeons. There are places that need a trauma surgeon that
can't get one because they're just not around. So, one idea, you know, as bad as it may be, is to put out anybody and everybody,
and you don't want to drop anybody just so you can get the numbers up there.
Gosh, there's so much to this, Tucker, that goes into this.
Well, back to the, I mean, all of this begins at the front end of the pipeline, which is medical school.
So, the standards for admission to medical school have been dropped dramatically for race reasons.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, they've taken the medical licensee examination, the three-part medical licensee examination, taking it from a graded exam to a pass-fail.
And to pass it, you only have to be
above the bottom 5% in grade.
If you are above the bottom 5%,
you are going to pass the medical licensee examinations.
And in spite of that, which is an abysmal standard
when you think about it, in spite of that,
something like 10% or more students at UCLA, 10% or more students flunk one or more of the exams.
And a number of them flunk these exams two and three times.
And yet they're still being put through medical school.
They don't want to drop you.
I know what I wanted to say.
Again, back to the DEI for a second.
If you're an attending in a surgical training program
and you have a surgeon that is inadequate,
he's just not cutting it.
And I saw this.
I had, and while I was in training,
there were surgeons or people that came into the program
that were dropped after year two
because it was clear that they weren't going to be able to do it.
They just didn't have the dexterity.
They didn't have the whatever.
Today, if you do that,
and it's a minority or underrepresented in medicine,
you know, minority surgeon,
as intending, if you hold them back or if you drop them,
what's going to happen is you're going to get reported.
You'll get reported to the DEI establishment in that program. And invariably, they're going to
side with the resident and not with the attending. Why do they have the moral high ground if they're
putting people's lives at risk, which they are? I mean, I think that's a crime. But how did they
get to attack you for upholding objective standards of surgery?
I just don't get the, like, are there no sane people left in American medicine?
Well, the thing is this.
How do you recognize the quality going down?
How do you recognize bad surgery?
And one way that you recognize that is by complications.
So, the question would be, are people dying?
Are complications going up, okay, in surgery?
Right now, you can't answer that question.
And one big reason why you can't answer the question is that, at least, and I'll have to say this is my opinion.
I can't keep quoting this, but I know this is how surgery has evolved.
The vast majority of surgery done today is done as an outpatient.
So, you know, the people that are in the hospital and have an operation are not the majority.
They're the minority.
So if you do outpatient surgery,
you do the operation, you know,
the patient goes home that day
or after an overnight stay.
Most complications don't arise immediately.
You know, bleeding occurs in the first day or two after.
Infections, three, four days. Pulmonary problems. In my particular profession, if I do a flap
reconstruction, I may not know if that flap's going to live or die for five, six, seven days
or more. So when you do have complications, they occur after the patient's out of the system,
so to speak, out of the hospital system. So there's no required reporting.
It's all self-reporting.
You know, you get a letter, you know, periodically from the hospital saying,
hey, can you please tell us how all of your patients did?
Do you have any complications?
They did great.
And it's human nature.
Of course.
If a patient gets an infection, you treat them with antibiotics, you know,
do you report that as a complication and the patient ultimately did okay?
You could argue no.
You might not report that and you could rationalize that it's okay.
So that's one of the issues.
The other issue, and I got this directly from one of the examiners.
I know someone who has been examining surgeons for 15 years for their boards. So when you go to take your board
examination, so he's one of the people that sits in the room and asks you questions and whatnot.
And what he's noticed is that a lot of these residents are coming in, he's looking at their
cases and he's thinking, oh my gosh, they're taking way too long to do these operations.
Now, one thing that's interesting is when you go for
your boards, the cases that they look at are not cases you did in training. These are cases you've
done since you've been out. When you finish your residency, you're allowed to go out and practice.
I could practice. I practiced for two years before I became board certified because it took two years
to get my board certification. So of course I have to be able to practice. And I'm regarded at that point as a board eligible surgeon, and I'm entitled to
full privileges and all those things. So, when I go to take my board examination, I present them,
you know, in my case, I present them with a log of everything I had done for the past year.
And they select cases to examine you on and so forth. It's an interesting experience to do
that. So these are the cases that these examiners are looking at, and he's saying, they're taking
way too long. Here's an operation that should normally take three to four hours. It's taking
seven to eight hours for this person to complete this operation. And I've seen this locally. I've
seen this in my own community where nurses who know the good surgeons from the bad surgeons say, Dr. So-and-so, he's so slow, he just takes forever to do this operation.
And complications are directly tied to length of surgery.
I mean, absolutely, positively correlated.
The longer the surgery, the more potential complications.
Exactly.
And this is recognized, and it's recognized in a very interesting way. The CMS, the Centers for Medicine, Medicare and Medicaid, they've come out and they said,
we are not going to pay for anesthesia beyond a certain time.
So if we have, for example, a breast reduction, which for me is about a three and a half to four hour operation,
we'll pay for four hours of anesthesia for breast reduction.
If it goes beyond that, we're not paying for that additional time.
And the idea is they recognize that, you know, people are taking too long to do these things.
Point is, anesthesia has nothing to do with the length of surgery.
They're just there to keep the patient asleep and stable and alive for you while you're doing an operation. But that's the only way they
can think to penalize the surgeon because the surgical time does not come into play unless you
look at hospital charges or anesthesia charges. And so they recognize this. And this goes back
to what I said. A lot of surgeons are not getting enough surgical experience to be able to operate,
one, independently, and two, I would say efficiently, competently to do. I'm not a
speedster, but I can certainly hold my own with my peers in terms of how long it takes me to finish
an operation and do a good job on it. I've never tried to be the fastest guy on the block.
So all those things go to the fact that you're not going to really recognize this decline because it's so subtle in so many respects.
And patients don't know that.
And that's the other reason why I'm here, Tucker.
I want this to be a wake-up call to my fellow surgeons.
This is what can happen to you if you speak up and you try to promote excellence in surgery and you try to object or push back against a liberal ideology, politics ideology, call it what you will, in surgery.
And I would love for there to be a groundswell of surgeons coming out and saying, hey, wait a minute, what's going on in my profession? Well, the fact that there isn't really bothers me because it's more than physical dexterity.
You're counting on, as a patient, reason.
You want a fact-based, logical physician,
or else you could die.
And so anyone who accepts clearly illogical,
unreasonable suppositions and doesn't push back against them is basically involved in witchcraft.
Right.
So if I could say to you something that is provably untrue and just on its face stupid, which is, you know, a black female patient needs a black female doctor.
It's like, what are you even saying?
Show me the evidence.
There is no evidence.
It's crazy on its face.
It's Nazi stuff.
If you go along with that, then you've disqualified yourself because you're not a rational person.
You're a witchcraft practitioner.
So that just freaks me out.
So you could say, well, good people are going along with this.
Well, no, they're disqualified by the fact they are going along with it.
As a patient, someone who's undergone two surgeries, that's, I mean, is that a fair view,
do you think? Absolutely. I mean, think about this. You're an intelligent person. You have
probably a wealth of experience because of what you do. You weren't aware of racial concordance.
And I mean, you ask any guy in the street about that, they're going to just
look at you like,
you know,
you have two heads.
What the heck is that?
Well, is it true?
And if it's true,
how is that true?
Again,
the rest of us
trust science
not because we trust
the people who carry it out,
but because the idea itself
is inherently reasonable.
Prove it,
or I don't believe it.
The burden of proof
is on the practitioner, the scientist, the physician, the surgeon.
And the whole system is based on that.
If you can't prove it, then you can't know it.
I thought that's science, right?
Well, that's what they call evidence-based medicine, which is…
Well, right.
Yeah, yeah.
But that's all medicine should be evidence-based medicine.
And if it's not evidence-based medicine, it's not really medicine.
It's witchcraft. So it freaks me out that the average doctor, average surgeon would for a second go along with this.
Well, think about it from this standpoint too. Think about the, for example, Celia Nelson,
the female Jamaican black surgeon that was on the Zoom call with me. She's worked
as hard as anybody to get to where she is. She's an excellent surgeon.
I mean, she's experienced racism. And she'll tell you flat out, yeah, when she first arrived there,
people wouldn't mistake her for, you know, asked her to get a cup of coffee in the surgeon's lab,
you know, those sorts of things. And she also noticed that sometimes when she'd walk into an exam room in the emergency room, that, you know, the look she would get was, you know, who is this?
Is this someone good?
And she's worked through all that.
Okay.
She's worked through that.
She just put her head down.
She worked hard.
And now she says what happens is when she goes into the ER, That patient has already heard from multiple staff
what a wonderful surgeon they're getting.
She's going to be in there to see them.
So, I mean, she's earned her place, okay?
But think how unfair it is
for the people coming up now,
the minority, if you will, surgeons
that have to face this idea
when they go into a room,
that person may look at them and say,
gee, is this a DEI
hire or is this a person that really-
I think everyone thinks that.
That went through, that got here because of their excellence, because of their excellent
academic performance in college and medical school, because of their excellent performance
in their residency, because they met all the standards, the standards that everyone should
have to meet, Or am I getting
someone who's a little bit less because of this? And that's part of the inference of it.
You're getting someone less overwhelmingly, and that's obvious. And it has nothing to do with race,
by the way. It's that preferences are always destructive of excellence. So if you tell me that you're the CEO of a company that
your family owns and you got the job because you're the first son, my first assumption is
they lowered standards to make you CEO. I mean, right? It's obvious. And so if I have a black
female surgeon, my first assumption will be this person had to meet lower standards because the school or the certifying board was so anxious to say we have a black female surgeon.
And, of course, it's unfair to the individual, but then the whole system is unfair.
So, should you be shocked that it produces unfair results?
No.
I mean, it's unfair.
It is unfair.
On the face of it and in practice and every other possible way.
Yes. on the face of it and in practice and every other possible way. The thing about anti-racism
that was so, I think, despicable
was it said that you cannot be against racism.
You have to be for this whole anti-racism shtick.
Attacking whites.
Yeah.
So, you know,
if you claim to be not a racist,
that's a racist statement.
I mean, talk about the...
But why would anyone go, of course, I mean, it's a Chinese finger trap.
Yeah.
You know, the harder you pull to get out, the more stuck you are.
But why would anybody, you're a surgeon, like you're at the very pinnacle of our system, like the science-based, reason-based civilization that we've built,
which we consider superior to like, you know, to the witchcraft-based societies of the rest of the
world. How in the world could you sit and let this happen? Anybody, any surgeon?
Well, I'll tell you why I did it. I was too busy. I was just, I had my head in the sand.
Well, you're the anomaly. You actually stood up and got
banned for standing up. I'm just saying, what about all your colleagues?
Well, I'm fortunate
in the sense that I was able to get through
a career, and I'm at the
twilight of my career, no, actually, the end of my
career. I have nothing to lose,
Tucker. I mean, they can't hurt me.
So, I got many messages,
private messages, which I can't access
any longer, from surgeons, including minority surgeons that said, you know, we agree with you, but we can't speak up because we're going to get pushed back.
You know, we're going to be called, you know, Uncle Toms or racist or whatever if we agree with the premise that you're putting out there.
I don't have much to lose.
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No, I mean, of course, I know that you're describing the real answer. That is the answer.
But it's just hard to let people like that off the hook. If you work in some, you know,
normal company, it's one thing. but if you're a surgeon, you understand
that lowering standards results in the deaths of people. The stakes are just the highest in any
part of our society. You have the highest stakes. So sure, it could hurt your career. Sure, it could
make you unpopular. Sure, they might call you names, Uncle Tom or whatever, but you balance
that against the deaths of innocents and you think, I have to say something, don't you?
And if you don't.
That's where I found myself.
Then you're, I can tell.
Yeah.
And bless you.
But if you decide, you know, people will die,
but my career is more important
or not being called names is more important,
then you're kind of a monster, aren't you?
I don't want to say that.
Well, I do.
I do.
I think that if you give the power that surgeons have,
the power to cut people open unsupervised,
and someone dies and you're the surgeon,
you're like God in the operating room,
you have that power.
In exchange for that power,
you have to hold yourself to the highest moral standards.
Don't you?
I agree with that.
You'll get no argument from me on that.
Who has more power than a surgeon?
Nobody. Yeah. In that immediate
moment, nobody does. That's what I'm saying.
I mean actual power, not theoretical power.
No. A surgeon has more power than the president.
He can cut open a person if the person's
unconscious. He has total control
over his operating room. Correct me if I'm wrong in any
of this. The captain of the
ship, basically. Unquestioned.
Right? So,
and he has a life in his hands like actual not theoretical actual beating heart person and so that person has to be of just the highest
moral caliber or else innocents die i mean that's my view anything which works against that you have
to fight i think you have to work against that uh it's it's disconcerting to me, you have to fight. I think you have to work against that.
It's disconcerting to me.
I have to say, maybe I could use stronger terms,
but I get a lot of private affirmation from colleagues, from surgeons.
I don't get a lot of public affirmation
for that very reason,
because some of them are older
and don't want to deal with the blowback,
the repercussions and the recrimination that can occur. Some of them, older and don't want to deal with the blowback, the repercussions and the recrimination that can occur.
Some of them, a few agree with the whole situation, crazy as it may be, all the DEI and so forth.
And most of them were kind of like me.
They were just going along and too busy taking care of their patients to the best of their ability.
I understand that. And I've been doing this for 38 years,
and it's really not until about three or four years ago
that I popped my head above the water, so to speak,
and looked around and said,
my gosh, the landscape out there has really changed.
This is not the field of medicine that I went into.
And you'd like to think when you've devoted your life
to a career, a profession,
that you're going to leave it a little better than you got it.
You know, I'm building my – I've built my practice on the shoulders of the people that went before.
And I have a very strong sense of responsibility that I have to honor the traditions and the efforts on my behalf to get me to where I was.
And you want to think that you've
done somewhat the same. Now, I'm not, I wasn't a professor, I wasn't a researcher, but in taking
care of patients, I've always tried to honor the efforts of the people that trained me and feel
like I could go off. Well, I've got a generation behind me now. I've got a daughter who's a
physician. I've got a son-in-law, her husband, who's a physician.
And I feel a very strong sense of obligation
to someday, when I can't do this anymore,
to say, okay, I did the best I could
to leave medicine in their hands better than I got it.
And I can't say that.
And that's tragic when you think about it,
to think that you're leaving a profession that you
love and have committed your life to and it's in much worse shape than than when it was put into
your hands yeah so i take not progress i take responsibility for that i take my own but but
the same time i think it's what happened to me if they if they can if the aecs can ban me with the
the impunity that they have done without accountability, without even following their own bylaws, for God's sakes, and they have no reason to engage with me, they can do this to anybody.
I mean, there's nobody out there who's safe.
And that's a pretty frightening proposition. And, you know, for those of us watching
who, you know, aren't doctors,
it eliminates all trust.
Don't trust doctors.
I don't want to go to the doctor.
I don't like doctors.
I loathe them.
I don't trust a lot of doctors.
You don't?
I don't.
Why?
My trust, COVID.
Yeah.
Me too.
I haven't been to the doctor since COVID.
What happened in COVID was so egregiously wrong that I just couldn't, I mean, I don't look at the CDC, the NIH, FDA in the same way any longer, public health officials.
And the other issue, I don't want to open a can of worms here, but the gender affirming care.
I mean, how in God's name did we get to a point where you have, in my profession as far as surgery is concerned, is probably the one most closely involved in the whole process of gender affirming care because of the work we do.
And to have this concept that there's no such thing as male and female, that you can take a biological male and convert them to a woman and they're really a woman.
I mean, that is, when you talk about witchcraft and voodoo, that is witchcraft and voodoo.
And all the scientific evidence is against it.
Do you know anyone who participates in it?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
You know people personally?
Now, I don't know people that are doing the gender-affirming care in minors.
And I want to be very clear.
You know, if an adult thinks, if an adult male, man thinks's a woman, and God bless them, I feel sorry for them.
Me too.
You really have to.
But they're an adult with agency to make decisions for themselves.
That's one thing.
Minors, it's a whole different thing.
Have you met any plastic surgeons who've done surgeries on minors?
Not that I know of personally, no.
I know some that are doing some of this, what they call, euphemistically top surgery where they take off a breast.
But they're doing this in women that are adults.
They're taking off their breasts to turn them into, you know, make them look more male-like.
I don't know anyone personally who's done this on children so far.
So you saw this with abortion.
Even when I was a child, there were doctors who said, you know, I just don't believe in it.
I think it's immoral.
I'm not participating in it.
Now it's my impression that it's pretty hard to be a doctor unless you commit abortion, like you kind of have to.
As part of your training, if you're OBGYN, I don't know that you can get through medical school without participating in an abortion, an elective abortion.
I can't speak to that because I think that there, I mean, I know from personally that
that wasn't the case.
I'm aware it was not the case.
No, I know that.
But my sense is now in practice, if not officially, that is the case.
And it's extremely hard to be an OBGYN resident and not participate in that. And I wonder if we're moving toward that scenario
with transgender surgery,
where maybe you don't get certified as a plastic surgeon
unless you participate in mutilating minors
in the service of ideology.
Could you see that happening?
Oh, I could definitely see it happening.
I mean, it is happening.
It is being done.
Now, are people being forced to do it?
I don't think that's necessarily the case.
I think people that are doing it are bought into the whole thing,
and they're doing that because they're bought into it.
But that just seems to act against evidence,
scientific evidence as a scientist, physicians or scientists.
I'm saying the same thing 10 times in a row, but it just seems like it just quite like you shouldn't be allowed to conduct science if you've shown that you don't
believe in it. As a resident in surgery, you don't have a lot of power, uh, in the sense of being
able to say, I won't do this,
I will do that. You can't pick and choose
what you're going to do.
When I was in training,
we had an experimental
clinical study going on
to do
bariatric weight reduction surgery.
Yes.
We're approaching these bypasses
through the chest and not the abdomen.
Yep.
And the attendings in our program came to us, the residents said, listen, we understand this is an experimental program.
We're not going to make you do this.
We'll let you decide for yourselves if you want to do these cases.
There were three of us at my level.
And two of us said no.
I was one of those,
and the third one said, sure, he'd do it. That you did not want to participate.
Did not want to do that.
I didn't think it was a good operation, a good idea.
Long and short of that,
the study showed that, yes,
you could lose weight by doing this,
but the weight came back.
Yes.
These patients gained weight again.
And so it was pretty much abandoned. And we're talking, you know, back in 1984, thereabouts.
And of course, I remember one young woman who died, you know, directly as a result of the
operation, which was pretty, it wasn't that big a group of patients, and they had one death in that
group. So, you know, you're not always allowed to make the decision about what you can do.
Now, if you're in a residency program and you've got surgeons that are doing, you know, gender-affirming surgery, again, in minors, and you don't want to participate in that, I can't speak to this.
I can't say that the resident has the ability to say, no, I'm not going to do that or I won't do that.
I do know that, you know,
are you familiar with the case of Eitan Haim?
I've interviewed him.
Oh, okay.
What a man he is.
One of my heroes.
He is.
There's someone who has true courage.
I mean, my courage is the courage of someone
that doesn't have too much to lose.
His is the courage of someone who has everything to lose.
That guy, I don't know if he's, I didn't ask him.
I don't know if he's a religious man but
i could feel a moral power on that guy yes he is religious okay well that i've i've spoke i'm i've
become friends with him and uh i really i've i've actually had call these you know divine moments
if you will but i've made a couple of just felt compelled to call him a couple of times.
And it just happened to be when he was in a really difficult down period
and just needed someone to affirm what he was doing
and to encourage him and so forth.
And so, you know, I just happened to be the person
that made that phone call.
And so we become friends.
Good for you.
And he is definitely a religious person and good i could
feel that on him i and more than that he's a he's a moral person and he he has a strong sense of the
other no it's you're absolutely right and of all the people i've interviewed boy it's funny you
mentioned him i've thought about him many times since that interview no he's still in the thick
of it and he's still under indictment and he's still facing trial and he's going to win oh he'll win and i well my suspicion is all going to be dropped because the the the reasons that
have been brought to the accusations are so out there that they just can't stand heim et a
n e-i-t-h-a-n-h-a-i-m, Eitan, Eitanheim. Eitanheim, Eitanheim. For those following who want to Google him.
Yeah.
So do you think that this can be fixed?
It can be fixed, yes.
But you're talking about a long, you know, the pipeline for surgery is five plus years.
So, you know, and then you got the four years before the medical school.
So if you're going to fix the problem,
you got to go back to the medical schools.
Honestly, you may have to go back to universities
where people are being indoctrinated
in all this social justice stuff
where they feel that that's more important
than what they're doing.
You know, the young doctors think
that righting historic wrongs
is more important than taking care
of the patient in front of them.
And you can't practice medicine that way.
That's just not medicine.
So it can be fixed.
It's going to be a generational problem.
It's going to take a long time.
We're going to be seeing the effects of this and paying the price for these policies and these ideologies for probably my lifetime, I suspect.
Which brings up the issue, you know,
I'm a healthy guy,
but every one of us is going to be
someday needing a doctor,
and I don't know who I'm going to go to.
I somewhat semi-seriously told friends and family,
I said, don't go to a surgeon or a doctor under 40,
because they've been indoctrinated.
Some of these guys are still wearing masks for
pete's sakes masks um oh yeah there's some physicians that still mask you know patients
and things like that it's just crazy there's crazy stuff out there tucker that so if you're a doctor
i mean and you're openly mentally ill like that why doesn't anybody no i don't mean that as an
attack i'm saying that with sympathy but if you you have— It's a great question. Why doesn't anyone in the physician's group or the hospital say something?
Well, first off, there's too few doctors.
I mean, there's so few that a lot of these guys, men, women, whatever, a lot of doctors are there because there's just not enough doctors.
I mean, if you try to get a doctor recently and make an appointment, just a routine appointment,
you're talking months down the road.
You need something more urgently, good luck with that.
You'll probably end up going to an urgent care center
where you'll see a nurse practitioner or PA
or someone that's got a fraction of the education experience
of a physician.
So it's not a real, there's not a simple cure for all of this. One thing I wanted
to try to do with this conversation is not just simply bad mouth, you know, my organization,
the ACS, or bad mouth medicine and surgery, because I'm devastated by what's happened.
I really want surgery to be elevated to where it should be,
which is a very highly regarded profession
that is dedicated itself to taking care of all comers, regardless.
We don't judge on who or what you are when you're in front of us
and you've got a problem that we're trained to fix.
So, my solutions, you know, my first solution, obviously, is get DEI out of medicine.
Politics and ideology do not belong in medicine.
I mean, the...
The Soviets proved that. You can take care of a patient if your first priority is to judge them based on their color, ethnicity,
is counter to everything that Hippocratic medicine is all about.
The other is to reinstall standards of excellence.
We have to quit lowering the bar.
We've got to start elevating the bar again.
And requiring that doctors and prospective doctors meet minimum standards.
There have to be some minimum,
but they have to be higher than the lower 5%
for Pete's sakes.
They can't be that.
We have to free the doctors in training
to do what they have to do.
You can't have restricted hours
when you've got such limited time anyway.
In the overall course of a person's lifetime,
three, four, five years in surgery is a drop in the bucket.
I mean, to ask a surgeon to devote themselves
to learning the craft and what they call
the art and the science of surgery,
not only do you need the time,
you need the person
to apply themselves. One thing I heard, which again is kind of disturbing, is that a lot of
young surgeons are more concerned about comfort, you know, work-life balance as it's often called,
as opposed to learning to be the best doctor they can be. They want to know how much time off they
have. They're very jealous of their time off. You know, five o'clock rolls best doctor they can be. They want to know how much time off they have.
They're very jealous of their time off.
You know, five o'clock rolls around, they're done.
They check out and they move out.
One thing that they found in asking all the program directors about the surgeons coming into their fellowships was that a large proportion did not have ownership of their patients.
And ownership means that, you know, you take that patient as your patient.
That's not just someone that you take care of for a 12-hour shift, and then you turn them over to the next person, and then you may not ever see that patient again, or not until two or three shifts later.
So a lot of young doctors don't have ownership for their patient.
I'm hearing that from colleagues.
So how do you treat a rental car?
Do you ever change the oil in it? No, I don't rotate the tires. I'm hearing that from colleagues. So how do you treat a rental car? Do you ever change the oil in it?
No, I don't rotate the tires. I don't tune it up.
That's exactly right.
Well, you've certainly wrecked my day, doctor, but I appreciate your doing this,
taking all the time to explain this.
We still have a good medical system. It's probably still, in many respects,
the best in the world. I have to believe that, But it's in disarray, and it's definitely, I believe, in decline.
And I believe that it's going to take some effort, some will,
from people that are willing to make those difficult changes.
Well, thank you for your bravery.
I don't consider myself brave, but I appreciate that.
I appreciate the thought.
Thank you.
Well, nobody else is.
And I can't thank you enough for giving me a pedestal in which to speak. Yeah, I had an emergency appendectomy once by Dr. Leon Pachter.
It was an amazing surgeon.
And it saved me.
And I think most people have had an experience like that.
And it's important.
Only with an interesting little factoid.
Ibram Kendi, the author of Anti-Racism.
Not a surgeon.
Not a surgeon.
He's an author of Anti-Racism.
A moron.
Yeah.
He had colon cancer.
Yeah.
And he reported that he went to, he interviewed several surgeons, black surgeons, showed the white surgeon for his surgery.
Because he was the most competent
shouldn't be allowed
nope
you get the surgeon
from Burkina Faso
Abram Kendi
that's my opinion
thank you doctor
but I'm obviously
a vindictive bad person
so
anyway thanks
I appreciate it
appreciate the time
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