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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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
When you say a push, but push by whom?
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
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.
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?
You'd think not.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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