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 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.
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.
Problem is you don't know who those ideologues are unless you start naming names.
Can you tell us what you mean? In fact, I'm delighted you said that because I don't want this to be about me. Yeah, I'm the one sitting in front of the microphone. I'm the one that was banned. But the issue is so far beyond me. In my 38 years of surgery, I have gradually watched the quality of training in young surgeons deteriorate.
noticeably in my own little backyard, watching young surgeons come out that have no business operating by themselves. You've seen that? I've seen that. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I can give you some examples. Please do. 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.
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.
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.
And every time he ties a stitch down, I mean, the abdominal wall is being distorted. I'm looking at him thinking, wow. And I was able to, I couldn't watch more than two or three stitches put in. And I said, you know, Joe, listen, you got things to do, you know, go ahead. I'm fine. I don't need the help. And he left. And- Was this someone who's out of medical school?
This 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.
This guy had no clue how to close an abdomen. I mean, it was really bizarre. And that's kind of an extreme example.
That's the thing. Lowered standards, basically.
No, no, he was not. He was your heteronormative white male like me, basically.
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.
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.
And these didn't happen to be surgeons, by the way. But kind of getting off track a little bit. I work with a young surgeon, arguably a good surgeon, And I was doing, again, a breast reconstruction, and he made a comment to me that I found astounding.
One of the common accompanying things you do in breast cancer treatment is a lot of times you go after lymph nodes in the armpit because you want to see if there's cancer there, or if there's cancer there, you want to remove the cancer. And that's called an axillary node dissection.
Basic operation.
Every general surgeon learns that.
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.
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.
Showing 61–80 of 190 · page 4 of 10
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