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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Appearances
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 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.
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 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 this is when I was told, oh, by the way, you are permanently banned from access to 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 of your 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. 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.
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.
And that's when you invited me onto your show very kindly.
They have. That's that's.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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