Dr. Richard Bosshardt
Appearances
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I'm still into it with them, yes. You're still into it with them? It's approaching its third year.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. That they brought up in the first place. 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
And that's when you invited me onto your show very kindly.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
They have. That's that's.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I think the way you do it is you do it really slowly over a long period of time. And no one really notices it 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. But, and I apologize, by the way, for putting you on the spot when we spoke, because I think I may have, remember I asked you a question, I said, what's the most important thing you look for in a surgeon? And you said excellence. Yes. Which was exactly right.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
But I wasn't looking for excellence. I was looking 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I mean, you're really hurting yourself and the patient if you 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Oh, no, not at all. Not at all. They'll refuse. I've written multiple letters. I wrote letters to the last two presidents. I never get an answer back. I wrote letters.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 pandemic.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Problem is you don't know who those ideologues are unless you start naming names.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. 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 worked a lot with the surgeons.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 breast. 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
This was 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 anything. that he was not very competent. And he eventually moved on. I don't know where he went or what he did.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
This guy had no clue how to close an abdomen. I mean, it was really bizarre. And that's kind of an extreme example.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
That's the thing. Lowered standards, basically.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
No, no, he was not. He was your heteronormative white male like me, basically.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 got to wonder what he's like.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 this something that I report? I don't report. I've spoken to, you know, colleagues and so forth. And I've only actually reported one or two doctors in my career because the circumstances are so egregious.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Basic operation.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Every general surgeon learns that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 node dissection in the course of his five years of general surgery training.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. What was the motive there? The idea behind it, the reason that it occurred was because of a death.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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? There is racism, and we need to ferret it out.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
And if you're good, if you're a good intern, if you're a good first year, second year resident, you know, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 patients
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
80%. Fellowships and whatever. Thoracic surgery, vascular surgery, colorectal, you name it. And that was in 2014, right? They surveyed program directors. These are the chiefs, the heads of surgical programs to find out what these residents that they were getting, what these surgeons that they were getting in Phillips were like.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Not—that would be pretty extreme.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I'll agree with you on that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
So what happens when... everything starts to go downhill really quickly. 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 as a surgeon, as an assistant, and whatnot. Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 F-A-C-S after your name. Yes. and something I sought to do.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 is 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
You learn about getting your hands in there.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
And that's what's scary. And that allows them to qualify for taking their boards.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 shy on 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Yes.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Yeah. They've taken the medical licensee examination, the three-part medical licensee examination, taken 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 licensure examinations.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 flunked 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. It was clear that they weren't going to be able to do it. They just didn't have the dexterity.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. But this was the one reason that they latched on to, and they have never let go. And then, have you heard of the term racial concordance? No.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. They'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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 the people that are in the hospital and have an operation are not the majority. They're the minority.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
So if you do outpatient surgery, you do the operation, the patient goes home that day or after an overnight stay. Most complications don't arise immediately. 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I know someone who has been examining surgeons for 15 years for their boards. So when you go to take your board examinations, 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 and he's looking at their cases and he's thinking, oh my gosh, they're taking way too long to do these operations.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. You know, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
If it goes beyond that, we're not paying for that additional time. And the idea is they recognize that 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
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
of surgeons come in and say, hey, wait a minute, what's going on in my profession?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
It'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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Absolutely. I mean, think about this. You're – 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?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Well, that's what they call evidence-based medicine, which is. Well, right. Yeah. Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
And she'll tell you flat out, yeah, when she first arrived there, people would 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
And she's worked through all that. She's worked through that. She's 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 she's earned her place. But think how unfair it is for the people coming up now.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 unfairness of it.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Well, that's the whole thing. They're trying to redo that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
They're trying to reinstall segregation into surgery, which, when you think about it, is a pretty despicable thing to do.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
It is unfair on the face of it and in practice and every other possible way. Yes. You know, the thing about anti-racism that was so, I think, despicable was it said that, you know, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Well, I'll tell you why I did it. I was too busy. I was just, I had my head in the sand.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Exactly. Okay. Well, you might need to get a white male surgeon of whatever your, I think, heritage is. Okay.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 Tom's or racist or whatever if we agree with the premise that you're putting out there. I don't have much to lose.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I need a Brazilian one, because my mother is Brazilian.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I don't want to say that. Well, I do.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Well, I'm half German, half Brazilian. There you go. Yeah. 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
You'll get no argument from me on that. Who has more power than a surgeon? Nobody. Yeah. In that immediate moment, nobody does. Right.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
The captain of the ship, basically.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
anything which works against that, 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 had a lot of private affirmation from colleagues, from surgeons.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
They were just going along and too busy taking care of their patients to the best of their ability. I understand that. To... You know, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
This is not the field of medicine that I went into. And, you know, you'd like to think when you've devoted your life to a career or profession that, that you're gonna leave it a little better than you got it.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I 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 wasn't a professor. I wasn't a researcher.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 now.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 when it was put into your hands.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I take responsibility for that. I take my own. But at the same time, I think it's what happened to me. If the AECS can ban me with 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, who's safe.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
And that's a pretty frightening proposition.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I don't. Why? My trust, COVID. Yeah. Me too. I haven't been a 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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, Abram Kendi's anti-racism, into the ACS as the value of the ACS. They opened up a brand new department of diversity, which had not existed before.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I mean, how in God's name did we get to a point where you have... 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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? No, I don't know people that are doing the gender-affirming care in minors. And I want to be very clear.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
If an adult male man thinks he's a woman, and God bless them, I feel sorry for them. Me too. They 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
uh not that i know of personally no i know some that are doing some of this what they call a few euphemistically top surgery where they take off a breast but they're doing this in in women that are adults they're taking off their breasts to 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 i just don't believe in it i think it's immoral i'm not participating in it
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I can't speak of 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
As a resident in surgery, um, You don't have a lot of power in the sense of being able to say, I won't do this or I will do that. You can't pick and choose what you're gonna do. When I was in training, we had an experimental clinical study going on to do bariatric weight reduction surgery. We were approaching these bypasses through the chest and not the abdomen.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. It 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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, yeah, she could lose weight by doing this, but the weight came back. These patients gained weight again. And so it was pretty much abandoned. We're talking back in 1984, thereabouts.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
And, of course, I remember one young woman who died directly as a result of the operation, which 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Oh, okay. What a man he is. One of my heroes. He is... Now, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Okay. I've spoken... I've become friends with him, and I've actually...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 to affirm what he was doing and to encourage him and so forth and so um you know i just happened to be the person that made that phone call and um So we become friends.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Good for you. And he is definitely a religious person. Good.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
And more than that, he's a moral person.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
No, he's still in the thick of it. And he's still under indictment. And he's still facing trial. He's going to win. Oh, he'll win. Well, my suspicion is it's all going to be dropped. Because the reasons that have been brought to, the accusations are so out there that they just can't stand. Eitan Haim. E-T-A-N? E-I-T-H-A-N-H-A-I-M. Eitan. Eitan Haim.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
ally and active bystander, white privilege. And when I saw this, this is one that, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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? 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Well, first off, there's too few doctors. I mean, there's so few that a lot of these guys, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
You'll probably end up going to an energy 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 badmouth my organization, the ACS, or badmouth medicine and surgery.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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. My solutions, my first solution, obviously, is get DEI out of medicine.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Politics and ideology do not belong in medicine.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
The idea that you can take care of a patient if your first priority is to judge them based on their color or 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 got to start elevating the bar again and requiring that doctors and prospective doctors meet minimum standards.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
One thing I heard, which again is kind of disturbing, is that a lot of young surgeons are more concerned about comfort, 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, 5 o'clock rolls around, they're done. They check out and they move out.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
And then you turn them over to the next person and then, you know, you may not ever see that patient again or not until, you know, two or three shifts later. You know, so a lot of young doctors don't have ownership for their patient. I'm hearing that from colleagues.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
No, I don't. I don't rotate the tires. I don't tune it up. That's exactly right. Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I don't consider myself brave, but I appreciate that. 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Holding with an interesting little factoid.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Ibram Kendi, the author of Anti-Racism. Not a surgeon. Not a surgeon. He's an author of Anti-Racism.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I appreciate it. Appreciate the time.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I mean, just to ask a dumb question. 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 Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 and said, this study is 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
When you say a push, but push by whom?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I think the only thing that's pushing this is ideology. I think if you're really science-based, 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 factual science or you're clueless and you're following whoever it is that's taking the lead on this
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 long.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
I think some members of the ACS have really not researched this to the extent they understand it, and they kind of go along. Because it sounds, you know, DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, it sounds wonderful. Who would not be for those two things?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
You'd think not.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
Who is they? This is 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
And my position was, you know, we're professionals. We're, you know, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 Eberlein, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 it twice.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 the site had a problem.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 this is when I was told, oh, by the way, you are permanently banned from access to the communities
The Tucker Carlson Show
Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.
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 of your continuous, and I'm basically quoting, your continuous use of disrespectful language and persistent posting of non-clinical material on clinical forums.