Dr. Richard Bosshardt
speaker
190 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Dr. Richard Bosshardt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I'm still into it with them, yes. You're still into it with them? It's approaching its third year.
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.
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 it 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 pandemic.
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? There is racism, and we need to ferret it out.
Not—that would be pretty extreme.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that's the whole thing. They're trying to redo that.
They're trying to reinstall segregation into surgery, which, when you think about it, is a pretty despicable thing to do.
Exactly. Okay. Well, you might need to get a white male surgeon of whatever your, I think, heritage is. Okay.
I need a Brazilian one, because my mother is Brazilian.
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.
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.
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