The Tucker Carlson Show - Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth： Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.

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00:00:30.180 So let me ask you, you, 2022, became famous for a day or two

00:00:37.660 because you got into it with the American College of Surgeons?

00:00:40.880 I'm still into it with them, yes.

00:00:42.500 You're still into it with them?

00:00:43.960 It's approaching its third year.

00:00:45.800 Its third year.

00:00:47.460 Can you just give us a quick reminder of what that Contre-Trump was about, what happened?

00:00:52.080 Sure.

00:00:54.020 I am a surgeon.

00:00:56.340 I'm a plastic surgeon, but I was a general surgeon for a while.

00:01:00.320 One of the things that I did after I became a surgeon

00:01:03.140 was to apply for fellowship in the American College of Surgeons,

00:01:07.660 which is an honorary sort of a thing to have, you know, attached to yourself.

00:01:13.660 If you become a fellow, you're allowed to put the letters F-A-C-S after your name.

00:01:18.740 And something I sought to do.

00:01:20.380 So I became a fellow on the ACS, the American College of Surgeons,

00:01:24.020 and went along for 30-plus years as a practicing surgeon doing my thing.

00:01:29.540 And then what happened was, in and around 2018, 2019, you could say I woke up.

00:01:38.860 I realized that there was something going on in my area of surgery.

00:01:43.500 And it began with a transcript of a lecture by an invited lecturer

00:02:10.320 to the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress that they have every year.

00:02:14.700 The lecture was titled,

00:02:16.140 A Pathway to Diversity, Inclusion, and Excellence.

00:02:20.960 That was the title of the lecture.

00:02:22.560 And for reasons that I can't explain, I read it.

00:02:26.220 I wouldn't normally have done that, but I read the entire transcript.

00:02:28.660 I read it twice.

00:02:30.280 And not once with excellence mentioned in there.

00:02:33.100 And so I wrote a commentary that was actually published in the Bulletin of the ACS,

00:02:38.660 where I expressed some concerns about taking down excellence

00:02:43.720 as the primary directive for surgery, for surgeons,

00:02:49.080 and replacing it with diversity, inclusion.

00:02:51.440 And at that time, the equity, they didn't throw that in there.

00:02:54.960 And that commentary didn't really do much.

00:02:58.400 So fast forward a couple of years,

00:03:00.560 and you have COVID, which, you know, its own thing.

00:03:04.140 And then you have the George Floyd killing.

00:03:08.000 And I think you could realistically say that the country went crazy after George Floyd.

00:03:12.100 I mean, everything from riots and whatnot to this mass movement to adopt the idea that

00:03:21.200 the country was systemically racist.

00:03:23.280 And every institution, every organization was racist.

00:03:26.700 And we had to radically transform the country.

00:03:29.360 And the American College of Surgeons was no different.

00:03:31.680 They jumped right on that bandwagon.

00:03:34.300 And within weeks after the George Floyd killing,

00:03:37.940 I mean, literally weeks,

00:03:38.760 they had assembled a task force on racism.

00:03:41.580 And they published this in the Bulletin,

00:03:43.340 which is their quarterly newsletter.

00:03:45.940 And the Bulletin basically said that they were doing this

00:03:48.860 to deal with racism in the ACS.

00:03:53.840 It wasn't like, is there racism in the ACS?

00:03:56.400 It was, there is racism, and we need to figure that out.

00:04:00.560 Like refusing to operate on black people? 0.98

00:04:03.540 Not, that would be pretty extreme. 0.99

00:04:05.860 No, I'm joking.

00:04:08.100 I mean, like where, where was the racism in surgery?

00:04:10.940 It's almost as bad, Tucker.

00:04:12.860 It's the, the idea is that, well, let me, let me take that step.

00:04:17.820 They, they claim that surgeons were racist, that the ACS itself was racist,

00:04:22.240 and that the practice of surgery was racist.

00:04:25.020 Okay.

00:04:25.500 And the reason why they made that last claim was because there are known disparities.

00:04:30.360 We know that the outcomes for surgery are not as good statistically for,

00:04:35.560 we'll just call it black and white because it just makes it easier to deal with that.

00:04:39.900 That is not as good for blacks as it is for whites. 0.99

00:04:42.800 And so the idea is that there is some element of racism or discrimination 0.96

00:04:46.800 that impacts the outcome of surgery.

00:04:49.220 And of course, if you take that to the next step, 0.86

00:04:51.860 it means that, you know, blacks are not getting as good care. 0.93

00:04:55.780 The surgery is not being as done as well and whatever.

00:04:58.840 However, there's a whole lot of reasons why you can have disparate outcomes,

00:05:02.320 that this was the one reason that they latched onto and they have never let go.

00:05:07.040 And then, have you heard of the term racial concordance?

00:05:10.720 No.

00:05:11.520 Okay.

00:05:11.820 That's, that's a really important concept.

00:05:13.960 And this is something that's being promoted by the ACS. 0.94

00:05:17.840 The ACS has explicitly stated that blacks would do better if their surgeon is black. 0.96

00:05:26.080 As simple as that.

00:05:27.000 That's a racial concordance that you are going to receive better care by a doctor,

00:05:32.400 surgeon or other doctor.

00:05:34.240 If they are of your same race, ethnicity, gender, that you might get better care,

00:05:39.360 pardon me, better care if you're a woman by a female surgeon, for example. 1.00

00:05:44.700 And they've hung on to that as well.

00:05:47.000 So that was the idea behind segregation in the South, of course.

00:05:50.460 Well, that's the whole thing.

00:05:51.360 They're trying, they're trying to redo their own.

00:05:53.200 Yeah.

00:05:53.460 They're trying to reinstall segregation into surgery, which when you think about it, is a

00:05:58.580 pretty despicable.

00:05:59.340 So I get a white male surgeon is what you're saying? 0.97

00:06:01.340 Exactly.

00:06:01.920 Okay.

00:06:02.220 Well, you might need to get a white male surgeon of whatever your, I think, heritage is. 0.52

00:06:05.460 Okay.

00:06:05.740 You know, you might do better with.

00:06:06.640 Kind of happy with a Swedish surgeon.

00:06:07.800 I feel like I'm going to win in this.

00:06:10.760 Yeah.

00:06:11.000 I need a Brazilian one because my mother is Brazilian. 0.94

00:06:14.840 Meaning German, by the way.

00:06:16.300 Well, I'm half German, half Brazilian.

00:06:17.880 There you go.

00:06:18.360 Yeah.

00:06:18.840 So what happened was this.

00:06:20.960 The task force came out with the recommendations at the end of 2020.

00:06:28.120 And the recommendations were, oh my gosh, I mean, it's just a litany.

00:06:31.700 It was basically a playbook for how to instill DEI.

00:06:36.060 They still weren't really calling it DEI that often.

00:06:38.640 They were calling it anti-racism still.

00:06:41.160 And that term kind of fell out of favor.

00:06:42.960 And then DEI became the nice, the more acceptable term for adopting critical theory, critical race

00:06:49.920 theory into surgery.

00:06:51.400 So the recommendations were to add anti-racism, Abram Kendi's anti-racism into the ACS as the

00:06:57.680 value of the ACS.

00:06:59.480 They opened up a brand new department of diversity, which had not existed before.

00:07:03.600 And this is what they call a regental department, meaning that the head of that department,

00:07:08.360 the clinical director, was now one of the members of the Board of Regents, had its own

00:07:12.500 clinical director, its own executive director.

00:07:15.560 They installed all these initiatives.

00:07:18.540 You know, they started training their staff and even the leadership on things like microaggressions,

00:07:24.760 implicit bias, ally and active bystander, white privilege.

00:07:30.600 And when I saw this, this is one that, I guess it really hit me.

00:07:38.440 I never thought I would be doing this at this point in my career.

00:07:42.380 I'm retired.

00:07:43.080 I'm three months retired from 38 years as a surgeon.

00:07:47.180 And to be an activist was never on my radar.

00:07:50.000 Yes.

00:07:50.360 But I couldn't let this stand.

00:07:51.600 It just really bothered me.

00:07:52.740 May I ask you to just go back to the core assumptions that drive this?

00:07:57.700 Are they rooted in science?

00:07:59.480 Is there...

00:08:00.140 Absolutely not.

00:08:00.800 Okay.

00:08:01.080 So is there any research at all that shows that the outcomes in surgery are better when

00:08:08.980 the surgeon is matched racially with the patient?

00:08:14.500 Absolutely.

00:08:15.860 Do No Harm, the organization that I joined as a result of this whole issue, has actually

00:08:22.280 published.

00:08:23.000 You can go online and you can read it.

00:08:25.140 They've done a systematic study.

00:08:28.480 Well, actually, they've looked at five systematic studies of this issue.

00:08:32.920 Does racial concordance, does concordance of ethnicity and race and so forth correlate

00:08:40.820 to better outcomes in surgery?

00:08:42.560 Short answer is no.

00:08:44.180 There's no scientific evidence that having a surgeon of your own race will provide better

00:08:50.600 outcomes.

00:08:51.060 Has there ever been evidence?

00:08:52.180 No. 0.99

00:08:53.440 So, I mean, just to ask a dumb question. 0.97

00:08:55.320 Well, let me qualify that. 0.94

00:08:57.660 There was a study put out that's been repeatedly referred to.

00:09:01.660 I mean, even today, it's been completely discredited.

00:09:04.200 But a study showed that the survival rates for black babies is better if they have a black 0.90

00:09:12.180 doctor, whether obstetrician or whatever, than if it's not.

00:09:17.080 And so, they keep repeatedly referring to the study.

00:09:21.260 But if you look at the study, the study design is terribly flawed.

00:09:24.940 The reviewer, if you're familiar with Vinay Prasad, who is a data geek and very good at

00:09:32.300 parsing clinical studies and so forth, came out and said, this study is catastrophically

00:09:37.520 flawed.

00:09:37.860 And even though this study does not, by any stretch, you know, show that this is the case,

00:09:43.500 it's still referred to as the primary evidence for this idea that racial concordance is a

00:09:50.660 real thing.

00:09:51.640 And it's still in the ACS.

00:09:53.780 Were there any, was there any push to make certain that white patients got white doctors?

00:10:03.500 When you say a push, but push by whom?

00:10:05.500 I'm just being perverse.

00:10:07.120 Like, did they really believe it when they said this?

00:10:10.840 They didn't really believe it.

00:10:12.180 This is just a way to lower the standards to change the racial composition of surgeons,

00:10:16.480 right?

00:10:16.860 I think the only thing that's pushing this is ideology.

00:10:19.340 I think if you're really science-based, you know, if you follow the science, as the saying

00:10:24.920 goes, if you look at that, you can't possibly believe that.

00:10:28.660 So either you have an ideology that supersedes, you know, factual science, or you're clueless

00:10:35.360 and you're following whoever it is that's taking the lead on this.

00:10:41.140 And who was taking the lead in the American College of Surgeons?

00:10:44.200 I think it was a very, I can't give you names.

00:10:46.500 I could probably name a few people that I know that were instrumental in pushing against

00:10:50.920 me, pushing back.

00:10:53.020 But I think it's a very small vocal group of very, very committed anti-racist or DEI zealots.

00:11:05.020 And I think the others have gone wrong.

00:11:07.340 I think some members of the ACS have really not researched this to the extent they understand

00:11:14.660 it and they kind of go along because it sounds, you know, DEI, diversity, equity, inclusions.

00:11:19.020 It sounds wonderful.

00:11:19.700 Who would not be for those three things?

00:11:20.960 Are those the rules in surgery?

00:11:22.340 Like if the other kids are for it, you just do it?

00:11:25.740 You'd think not.

00:11:27.160 You would think not.

00:11:29.440 Yes.

00:11:29.820 That's the thing that was so disconcerting to me.

00:11:34.100 Let me carry the story just a step further down the road.

00:11:37.080 I wrote to the president of the ACS and I expressed my concerns.

00:11:42.320 And I'm a writer.

00:11:43.400 This is what I don't, talking is not my thing, but I love to write.

00:11:47.320 And I wrote a three-page single-space letter in which I outlined my concerns.

00:11:51.640 Never got a response from that.

00:11:53.760 And so the next thing I did was I actually posted the ACS of the website, of course, and

00:11:58.980 they have a thing called the Communities, which is a forum for surgeons to communicate

00:12:02.720 with one another.

00:12:03.240 If you have a question, you can pose it and surgeons will weigh in and provide advice or

00:12:08.380 answers.

00:12:08.860 If you have something, a topic you want to discuss, do the same thing.

00:12:11.980 So the largest forum is the General Surgery Forum.

00:12:15.380 And so I posted on that forum basically that I was concerned about this rush to embrace

00:12:20.280 anti-racism DEI in the ACS.

00:12:22.540 And if this continued, I didn't see how I could maintain my fellowship.

00:12:26.020 I would drop my membership in the ACS, which is something I never imagined I would do because

00:12:30.260 I've been a proud member of the ACS for over 30 years.

00:12:32.500 And I'm not here to bash the ACS.

00:12:34.380 I want to be very clear about that.

00:12:37.080 I'm still FACS.

00:12:38.440 I'm still a fellow.

00:12:39.120 They consider me a fellow, even though I'm permanently banned, which is kind of an interesting

00:12:42.680 situation to be in.

00:12:45.820 And so I posted this thing saying that I would leave the ACS if this continued.

00:12:50.340 And that generated a comment thread.

00:12:51.980 And if you're familiar with comment threads, if you look at the engagement in the comment

00:12:56.540 thread, usually it's only about 1% to 10% of people that are reading the comment thread

00:13:01.220 that actually engage because that's just the nature of things.

00:13:05.200 That comment thread ran for four months and 75 individual surgeons and over 1,000 comments.

00:13:13.620 It broke the system, basically.

00:13:16.080 I mean, they had to open up a second comment thread because they'd never had this much

00:13:19.060 engagement on anything.

00:13:20.580 And two-thirds of the surgeons that engaged weighed in favor of my position as opposed

00:13:27.780 to the ACS.

00:13:28.500 And they kept saying, why are we doing this?

00:13:30.480 Tell me where the racism is.

00:13:31.840 Let's deal with the racism.

00:13:32.940 But don't just call us racist and go with that.

00:13:36.600 And they repeatedly refused to do that.

00:13:39.760 So who is they?

00:13:40.920 This is the leadership of the ACS.

00:13:43.440 And this is my beef is not with the ACS, with my fellow surgeons.

00:13:47.140 My beef is with the leadership of the ACS.

00:13:48.780 It might be interesting just to hear if you can recall some of the names of the leadership

00:13:52.180 who did that just for the record.

00:13:53.640 I don't have any problem because it's public record.

00:13:55.940 The general secretary was a fellow named Tyler Hughes, just retired.

00:13:59.520 Tyler Hughes.

00:14:00.180 Yeah, general surgeon.

00:14:01.260 And he was the editor-in-chief of the communities.

00:14:04.300 So he was kind of moderating.

00:14:06.100 And he would weigh in sometimes if it seemed like, you know, surgeons were getting a little

00:14:09.460 bit too heated and so forth.

00:14:11.420 And my position was, you know, we're professionals.

00:14:15.200 We're, you know, surgeons are opinionated.

00:14:17.520 We're not shrinking violets.

00:14:19.120 We state our case.

00:14:20.880 We're certainly qualified to have conversations without a chaperone.

00:14:23.920 And I didn't really like the whole chaperoning thing that was going on.

00:14:27.700 And so this went forward.

00:14:29.780 And as common threads do, it kind of ran its life expectancy really beautifully.

00:14:35.340 John, what you'd think, four months.

00:14:37.180 At which point I was thinking, so, okay, so I did that.

00:14:39.640 What do I do now?

00:14:40.460 And I was waiting to see what my next step would be when the ACS leadership, the Board

00:14:45.360 of Regents, reached out to me.

00:14:47.740 Tyler Hughes reached out to me and said, we'd like to have you on a Zoom call.

00:14:52.720 And this was going to happen in 2022.

00:14:56.320 They wanted to wait a little bit.

00:14:58.300 It wasn't until March because they were bringing on board their new Director of Diversity, a

00:15:03.380 doctor named Bonnie Mason, who was their Clinical Director of Diversity.

00:15:07.160 And so the Zoom call consisted of myself and Tyler Hughes and Bonnie Mason and a regent of

00:15:13.580 the ACS, a member of the Board of Regents named Tim Eberlind, who is a very well-known, prominent

00:15:17.700 surgeon in a big institution.

00:15:21.820 And I had joined a group called FAIR, FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.

00:15:28.900 And I helped found FAIR in Medicine, which has been working, kind of like doing no harm in

00:15:33.880 the area of DEI medicine.

00:15:35.740 And so I went to some of my colleagues in FAIR and said, hey, listen, I'm invited to this

00:15:39.220 Zoom call.

00:15:40.420 How do you think I should prepare for this?

00:15:43.040 And the first thing they said is, don't go by yourself because you're going to get jumped

00:15:47.080 on.

00:15:48.020 I said, okay, that sounds like a reasonable piece of advice.

00:15:51.420 So I invited a colleague of mine who's a surgeon I worked with for 30 years.

00:15:55.160 Her name is Celia Nelson.

00:15:56.220 And Celia is a Jamaican-born, black female general surgeon, which is unusual.

00:16:02.160 She's definitely in the minority in the ACS. 0.94

00:16:04.960 And she came on the call.

00:16:06.260 So it was five of us on the call.

00:16:08.720 Very, very civil conversation.

00:16:10.400 Well over an hour.

00:16:11.260 We each stated our position.

00:16:12.520 I stated my concerns.

00:16:13.760 She expressed the same concerns that I did from her standpoint as a woman, a black woman

00:16:17.960 surgeon.

00:16:19.700 And I left so encouraged from that.

00:16:21.760 I said, wow, this is great.

00:16:22.780 We've got a dialogue.

00:16:23.540 And this is what I wanted, a dialogue.

00:16:25.660 And I sent an email to everyone that was on the Zoom call and said, thank you so much.

00:16:30.080 I hope this will be the start of a conversation where we can discuss these things.

00:16:34.580 And a few weeks later, I couldn't get on the communities anymore.

00:16:37.600 I tried to get on the website and get on the communities and I couldn't get on.

00:16:40.680 And I thought, okay, there's some glitch here.

00:16:42.460 I think maybe it was on the site had a problem.

00:16:45.200 I waited and I waited pretty close a couple of weeks before I finally said, I contacted Tyler

00:16:50.040 and said, Tyler, what's going on?

00:16:52.900 I can't get on the communities.

00:16:54.940 And this is when I was told, oh, by the way, you are permanently banned from access to the

00:17:00.940 communities.

00:17:02.260 And in addition, you're banned from access to the member directory of the ACS and you're

00:17:07.400 banned from your own private voicemail box.

00:17:09.380 So, it was a total, total isolation.

00:17:13.940 And I said, why?

00:17:15.240 Why am I being banned?

00:17:17.460 And the answer was because if you're continuous, and I'm basically quoting, your continuous use

00:17:22.660 of disrespectful language and persistent posting of non-clinical material on clinical forums.

00:17:29.080 So, the thing was, I was being disrespectful, which I have disputed, and I can prove I wasn't.

00:17:35.440 And my non-clinical material was posting this issue of DEI on the clinical forums.

00:17:40.920 That they brought up in the first place.

00:17:43.240 That they, well, and what's interesting is this, they're the ones saying that clinical

00:17:46.760 outcomes in surgery are being impacted, you know, adversely for minorities.

00:17:50.400 But I mean, you were a, I mean, you spent over 30 years just being a surgeon, cutting and

00:17:56.160 healing people.

00:17:56.920 Right.

00:17:57.060 You're not the one who brought this topic into the ACS in the first place.

00:18:01.040 They did.

00:18:01.540 Yeah.

00:18:02.180 Yeah.

00:18:02.980 But because you discussed a topic that they introduced, they said you weren't a serious

00:18:08.900 doctor and needed to be banned.

00:18:10.800 I was disruptive and I was being disrespectful.

00:18:12.820 And so, I did ask, I said, can you please show me a single example of anything that I

00:18:17.560 have said at any time that justifies this ban?

00:18:21.760 And they have never done that.

00:18:23.000 I've asked it several times.

00:18:24.360 They've refused every single time.

00:18:25.600 So, I appealed.

00:18:27.500 I went to the Board of Regents and appealed.

00:18:29.180 And I said, you know, you know, this is, this is wrong.

00:18:32.480 And they came back and said that we reviewed this and we uphold the ban.

00:18:36.400 And this is, this is interesting.

00:18:38.580 They said, and we feel that you have received due process.

00:18:41.800 Well, due process means that they're saying it went through the proper channels in the ACS.

00:18:47.360 Well, the channels are, there's a fixed process for disciplining a surgeon.

00:18:53.020 You have to be informed that you're being investigated for some issue.

00:18:56.840 That has to go to their central judiciary committee, which is empowered to investigate their members.

00:19:05.180 They decide if there's merit to this, you know, allegation.

00:19:08.800 And if there is, they send it back to the Board of Regents.

00:19:12.500 So, then has to, you know, does the punishment, whatever that may be, could be expelled, could be whatever.

00:19:20.420 They never did that.

00:19:21.540 It never went to the judiciary committee.

00:19:23.880 They never informed me that I was being investigated for a possible lifetime ban.

00:19:28.180 And as a member of the ACS, I am entitled.

00:19:31.960 My privileges include the right to having a hearing.

00:19:35.120 If I'm looking at being disciplined by my organization, I have a right to have a hearing to defend myself.

00:19:40.400 And they denied me that hearing.

00:19:42.160 And the reason, it's like a catch-22.

00:19:45.360 It didn't go through the central judiciary committee.

00:19:47.960 Therefore, I don't deserve a hearing.

00:19:50.100 Even though, I mean, the gaslighting is unbelievable, Tucker.

00:19:54.320 It's just unbelievable.

00:19:55.020 So, I exhausted every avenue I had to address this with the ACS internally.

00:20:00.900 And that's when I went public.

00:20:02.120 And that's when I wrote my article to the Wall Street Journal.

00:20:04.580 And that's when you invited me onto your show very kindly.

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00:22:13.580 I wanted to hear more about it, not simply because you're the victim of grotesque injustice and authoritarianism,

00:22:20.840 but because the consequences of this kind of thinking are so dangerous to the public health that I think people need to know.

00:22:29.800 Because everything you're saying suggests that they're going to radically lower the standard for surgeons.

00:22:35.500 Not that they are.

00:22:36.640 They have.

00:22:38.080 They have.

00:22:39.140 That's, that's...

00:22:40.660 So how is that not a felony?

00:22:42.500 How can you do that?

00:22:43.800 How can you lower the standard for surgeons or air traffic controllers or anyone who's got a job with the public health in his hands?

00:22:52.120 You know, a critical job, the critical jobs in our society, and you lower the standards for that?

00:22:56.480 That's not a crime?

00:22:58.520 I think the way you do it is you do it really slowly over a long period of time.

00:23:02.740 And no one really notices until it gets to that.

00:23:04.940 Until people die.

00:23:06.120 Well, until...

00:23:07.180 Yeah, that's an interesting thing you say that.

00:23:08.800 You work with a knife in your hand.

00:23:10.360 I mean, this is like the highest level of trust. 0.61

00:23:12.940 You're saying to somebody, I'm going to let you cut me open.

00:23:16.040 Who would you say that to?

00:23:17.140 Only a surgeon.

00:23:18.380 And so the consequences are just beyond.

00:23:20.940 If there was ever a field, you know, people talk about airline pilots, sure.

00:23:25.940 If there was ever a field where excellence is a sine qua non of the field, it has to be medicine.

00:23:31.520 And even beyond that, it has to be surgery.

00:23:33.580 Exactly.

00:23:33.980 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.

00:23:45.020 But, and I apologize, by the way, for putting you on the spot when we spoke.

00:23:49.380 Because I think I may have...

00:23:50.540 Remember I asked you a question.

00:23:51.520 I said, what's the most important thing you look for in a surgeon?

00:23:54.360 And you said excellence?

00:23:55.520 Yes.

00:23:55.840 Which was exactly right.

00:23:56.820 But I wasn't looking for excellence.

00:23:58.100 I was looking for trust.

00:24:00.300 You have to trust...

00:24:01.080 Well, one flows from the other.

00:24:01.960 You have to trust your surgeon.

00:24:03.700 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. 0.72

00:24:10.500 I mean, you're really, you know, hurting yourself and the patient if you can't get that trust pretty quickly.

00:24:17.360 Because when you walk into the ER, you don't have a lot of time to connect.

00:24:20.920 You can't be doing those nice social things.

00:24:24.640 So my ban remains in place.

00:24:27.520 I'm still banned.

00:24:28.580 The ACS will not engage with me.

00:24:29.980 They have not engaged with you in three years.

00:24:32.540 Oh, no.

00:24:32.940 Not at all.

00:24:33.560 Not at all.

00:24:34.100 They will refuse.

00:24:35.680 I've written multiple letters.

00:24:38.540 I wrote letters to the last two presidents.

00:24:41.760 I never get an answer back.

00:24:44.720 I wrote letters...

00:24:46.280 Well, I would just encourage anyone watching to...

00:24:48.940 Let's Google these people and do not accept medical care from them.

00:24:52.880 I don't want to be cut by an unreasonable ideologue.

00:24:57.080 Problem is, you don't know who those ideologues are unless you start naming names.

00:25:02.580 It would be nice to have their names.

00:25:04.380 So you said not only do they plan to lower standards, but they already have.

00:25:09.500 Can you tell us what you mean?

00:25:12.160 In fact, I'm delighted you said that because I don't want this to be about me.

00:25:17.140 Yeah, I'm the one sitting in front of the microphone.

00:25:19.480 I'm the one that was banned.

00:25:20.800 But the issue is so far beyond me.

00:25:26.680 In my 38 years of surgery, I have gradually watched the quality of training in young surgeons deteriorate.

00:25:36.440 You know, noticeably in my own little backyard, watching young surgeons come out that have no business operating by themselves.

00:25:45.420 And...

00:25:45.720 You've seen that?

00:25:46.300 I've seen that.

00:25:47.300 Oh, yeah, absolutely.

00:25:49.280 I can give you some examples.

00:25:52.280 Please do.

00:25:52.960 Doing...

00:25:53.320 I did a...

00:25:53.720 I had a young...

00:25:54.700 This is actually a few years back.

00:25:56.320 I had a new surgeon in town at a hospital that I worked at.

00:25:59.560 And I do breast reconstruction.

00:26:01.280 So I worked a lot with the surgeons.

00:26:03.360 Together, we'll...

00:26:04.220 You know, they'll remove the cancerous breast sometimes. 1.00

00:26:06.980 A lot of times, they'll remove the other breast simultaneously. 1.00

00:26:09.900 And then I will come in and do the reconstruction.

00:26:11.580 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.

00:26:24.320 And there's a lot of things that have to be done.

00:26:26.680 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.

00:26:34.800 I said, great.

00:26:35.480 This probably cut an hour and a half or two hours out of my operating time.

00:26:39.580 And so I glanced down to see what he was doing.

00:26:42.940 And he's taking these massive bites of tissue.

00:26:47.460 And every time he ties the stitch down, I mean, the abdominal wall is being distorted.

00:26:53.740 I'm looking at him thinking, wow.

00:26:56.200 And I was able to...

00:26:58.620 I couldn't watch more than two or three stitches put in.

00:27:00.760 And I said, you know, Joe, listen.

00:27:04.120 You got things to do.

00:27:05.440 You know, go ahead.

00:27:06.340 I'm fine.

00:27:07.200 I don't need the help.

00:27:08.520 And he left.

00:27:10.580 And...

00:27:11.140 Was this someone who's out of medical school?

00:27:13.860 This is a fully trained surgeon.

00:27:15.320 Just newly...

00:27:16.040 Just what, you know, opened up practice in my community.

00:27:18.840 And he didn't last very long.

00:27:20.040 It became very obvious soon because in small hospitals, you can't hide that he was not very

00:27:25.300 competent.

00:27:26.040 And he eventually moved on.

00:27:27.580 I don't know where he went or what he did.

00:27:29.820 But it was obvious to you just from looking down.

00:27:32.400 This guy was not qualified.

00:27:33.440 This guy had no clue how to close an abdomen.

00:27:35.960 I mean, it was really bizarre.

00:27:37.980 And that's kind of an extreme example.

00:27:39.720 How did he become a surgeon?

00:27:41.740 That's the thing.

00:27:44.460 Lowered standards, basically.

00:27:46.040 Was this person from a protected racial group or...

00:27:48.400 No.

00:27:48.880 No, he was not. 0.70

00:27:49.660 He was your heteronormative white male like me, basically. 0.99

00:27:53.940 But he was incompetent. 0.99

00:27:55.420 Oh, yeah.

00:27:56.140 Yeah.

00:27:56.320 Well, I only saw this one example.

00:27:58.380 But, you know, the thing speaks for itself.

00:28:00.380 If a person is doing this in such a simple situation, such as closing an abdominal wall,

00:28:06.580 then you've got to wonder what he's like.

00:28:08.060 And I've worked with other surgeons that were...

00:28:11.500 There's a couple that I refuse to work with that were so bad that, you know, you often

00:28:17.540 have to ask yourself, is this something that I report?

00:28:20.660 I don't report.

00:28:22.160 I've spoken to, you know, colleagues and so forth.

00:28:24.940 And I've only actually reported one or two doctors in my career because the circumstances

00:28:30.280 are so egregious.

00:28:31.100 And these didn't happen to be surgeons, by the way.

00:28:33.880 But kind of getting off track a little bit, I work with a young surgeon, arguably a good

00:28:40.200 surgeon.

00:28:41.420 And I was doing, again, a breast reconstruction.

00:28:43.720 And he made a comment to me that I found astounding.

00:28:47.080 One of the common accompanying things you do in breast cancer treatment is a lot of times

00:28:53.260 you go after lymph nodes in the armpit.

00:28:55.380 Yes.

00:28:55.520 Because you want to see if there's cancer there.

00:28:57.260 Or if there's cancer there, you want to remove the cancer.

00:28:59.900 And that's called an axillary node dissection.

00:29:02.400 Yes.

00:29:02.720 Basic operation.

00:29:03.760 Even I know about it.

00:29:04.820 Every general surgeon learns that.

00:29:06.500 Yes.

00:29:07.140 And we were doing a case and he was doing a biopsy in the armpit, removing a single

00:29:12.980 lymph node.

00:29:14.000 And he commented, says, you know, I'm really glad I don't have to do an axillary node

00:29:17.040 dissection because I've never done one before.

00:29:19.820 And this is a fully trained, board certified general surgeon.

00:29:22.880 Had never done an axillary node dissection in the course of his five years of general

00:29:27.880 surgery training.

00:29:30.540 Let me stick back a second to when you ask about quality and how it's gone down.

00:29:36.160 It's not a conscious thing.

00:29:37.940 It's not been deliberate.

00:29:38.800 I don't think that we have gone out deliberately to create a decline in the quality of surgery.

00:29:44.600 I think a lot of circumstances have come together to do that.

00:29:48.020 One was in 2003, the American Graduate Medical Education.

00:29:53.680 They came out and they took a law that was basically confined to New York from 1964 and

00:29:59.780 made it nationwide.

00:30:00.740 And that law was a reduction of residency hours.

00:30:03.680 In other words, you can't take a trainee in any medical specialty and make them work more

00:30:10.220 than 80 hours a week or more than 24 hours at a stretch.

00:30:13.180 And so that reduced residency hours dramatically because when I trained, it was not uncommon

00:30:18.860 to work a 90 to 110 hour week.

00:30:20.900 That was pretty typical.

00:30:22.500 And be on call, you know, 36 hours straight.

00:30:25.360 I once worked 48 hours straight.

00:30:27.800 Not that that's a great thing, but you know, you do what you have to do and you learn.

00:30:31.220 You learn to operate under circumstances when you're tired and things like that.

00:30:35.020 Um, and the idea was to reduce medical errors and things like that, which has been disproven

00:30:40.860 that studies have shown that that reduction in hours had nothing, did nothing to improve

00:30:45.300 medical errors.

00:30:46.940 But that was one thing that, that cut back the hours for training and surgery.

00:30:50.960 Um, you know, you have a very limited motive there.

00:30:54.620 The, the idea behind it, the reason that it occurred was because of a death.

00:31:00.140 Uh, a young woman died in New York, uh, because of a, a, uh, medical, a drug error, a very rare

00:31:08.660 drug reaction.

00:31:09.940 Uh, and her father happened to be a very prominent attorney.

00:31:13.260 And, um, he decided that the reason was that these residents were working too hard.

00:31:18.040 They were too tired and we needed to change that.

00:31:19.980 And there was a spate of New York Times stories about this.

00:31:22.420 Yeah.

00:31:23.140 I remember this.

00:31:24.180 Yeah.

00:31:24.460 And, uh, that was only confined to New York until 2003.

00:31:27.440 Then it become a nationwide thing.

00:31:30.140 So general surgery is a five-year residency program.

00:31:33.740 Okay.

00:31:34.480 In the first two years, you learn patient care.

00:31:36.920 You learn how to take care of patients before and after.

00:31:39.940 You assist in operations.

00:31:41.940 Uh, you do diagnostic, uh, differential diagnosis, and you learn how to work up a, a problem.

00:31:48.420 And if you're good, if you're a good intern, if you're good first year, uh, second year

00:31:52.340 resident, you know, they throw your bone on again.

00:31:54.620 They'll let you do a hernia and they'll let you do an appendectomy and they hold your hand

00:31:58.480 while you do it.

00:31:59.160 Um, and then in the third and fourth years, you start to operate more, but you're always

00:32:04.960 operating under the direct supervision of a, um, uh, senior resident or an attending, attending

00:32:11.120 as a fully trained surgeon.

00:32:13.200 Uh, and again, you're having your hands held.

00:32:15.160 I mean, they have to let you work.

00:32:16.540 They got to put the knife in your hand, but they have to be good enough to do that and

00:32:20.720 keep you out of trouble.

00:32:21.540 And if you get in trouble to get you out of trouble.

00:32:24.700 And so you spend those three to four years kind of honing your skills.

00:32:27.900 And then in the fifth year, when you are what we call a chief resident, you're basically

00:32:32.920 regarded as being a surgeon and you, you get your, you do your cases, you assist the younger

00:32:39.080 surgeons in their cases.

00:32:40.320 And the only time you call an attending surgeon in is if you're doing something very major,

00:32:44.460 very complex and, and, or if you haven't done this before.

00:32:47.780 And so at the end of that fifth year, you should be able to walk out of the hospital and go anywhere

00:32:54.180 and operate as a general surgeon and function fully independently.

00:32:59.880 A study done in 2014 in the annals of surgery reported that 80% of the graduating general surgeons

00:33:11.100 were not going into practice.

00:33:13.820 They were going on to do, uh, a fellowship.

00:33:16.920 Fellowship is additional 80%, uh, fellowships in whatever, thoracic surgery, vascular surgery,

00:33:23.600 colorectal, you name it.

00:33:25.240 Um, and that was in 2014.

00:33:31.620 They surveyed program directors.

00:33:34.180 These are the chiefs, the heads of surgical programs to find out what these residents that

00:33:39.600 were, they were getting, what these surgeons that they were getting in Phillips were like.

00:33:43.120 They found that that 66% of them could not be relied upon to operate independently for more

00:33:51.180 than about 30 minutes.

00:33:53.800 That's something like 30% or so could not handle tissues in a manner that was appropriate,

00:34:01.400 atraumatically, if you will.

00:34:02.620 Um, uh, 20, 30% couldn't sew properly.

00:34:07.880 Um, close to the same number couldn't identify the early signs of a complication.

00:34:13.340 Um, some could not identify an anatomical tissue plane.

00:34:17.180 Um, these are people that are graduates of general surgery residencies coming out of these programs and

00:34:22.120 going to fellowships.

00:34:23.040 The saddest thing is that when they surveyed the, the surgeon, the young surgeons themselves

00:34:28.260 and say, well, why are you going into this fellowship instead of going out and practicing?

00:34:33.140 More than half say it's because they did not feel comfortable operating independently after

00:34:39.280 five years of training.

00:34:40.340 So there's something very wrong with the training they're getting.

00:34:42.980 They're not getting enough cases to do.

00:34:45.960 They're not being allowed to operate.

00:34:48.340 You know, in some places, the attending surgeons are very hesitant to hand over a case to a

00:34:54.980 younger surgeon because number one, they're responsible for that case. 0.72

00:34:59.760 Number two, um, you're never going to be as, as efficient or fast as a young surgeon as

00:35:04.760 you will later on when you've had more experience.

00:35:06.700 So it takes longer and it impacts your day, your schedule.

00:35:10.980 Um, the, the, it's, it's sad because they recognize this.

00:35:16.120 I mean, these young surgeons recognize this.

00:35:17.500 It's, I mean, it sounds like a total failure to train the next generation of surgeons.

00:35:23.320 It's a system failure and the ACS recognizes this.

00:35:27.040 And you know how I know that?

00:35:28.420 It's because since 2014, they've initiated a, what they call a mentorship program.

00:35:33.760 And what they do is they try to find experienced surgeons that will mentor these young surgeons

00:35:39.280 to help them come up to speed.

00:35:42.180 Okay.

00:35:42.440 So a young surgeon out of, out of training that should be able to work on their own and

00:35:47.900 find that they're struggling or not really able to do that.

00:35:51.880 They would have an experienced surgeon to, I don't want to say hold their hand, but to

00:35:56.240 oversee them, supervise them, you know, scrub with them.

00:35:58.620 They can't find enough surgeons to do that for one thing.

00:36:02.020 Here's where the DEI really comes in too, is they have this idea of racial concordance

00:36:06.660 that what they need to do is find, if it's a black surgeon, they got to find a black mentor

00:36:10.960 for him.

00:36:11.980 And if it's a Hispanic surgeon, they got to find a Hispanic mentor.

00:36:15.000 And there's not enough of those to go around.

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00:38:03.700 So in addition to what are demonstrable, provable failures of medical schools to train the next generation of surgeons,

00:38:12.460 and can I just say parenthetically, I feel like if they're not training surgeons adequately,

00:38:17.880 you know, surgeons are a small percentage of all physicians, probably the most important,

00:38:21.820 but they're probably not, and probably the smartest and most driven, then they're probably failing.

00:38:26.240 I'll agree with you on that.

00:38:27.220 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:27.980 They're surgeons, right?

00:38:29.180 It's the most straightforward kind of medicine.

00:38:31.020 So, but in addition to that, they overlay these racial mandates.

00:38:40.640 They decide that racism is the real problem, not incompetence.

00:38:43.480 And then they put these mandates in where, like, you have to somehow have doctors of all these different backgrounds, which you don't have.

00:38:52.720 So what happens when everything starts to go downhill really quickly?

00:39:00.300 I have, I get people contact me just because of my, my profile has been elevated by being out there a little bit.

00:39:07.320 But 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.

00:39:20.280 And she was concerned because she wanted to get the most out of her training.

00:39:23.520 And so she reached out to me to find out what things she could do.

00:39:27.100 She told me things that were unbelievable.

00:39:28.420 I mean, I never imagined these things.

00:39:30.340 And this has been confirmed, not, it wasn't just my conversation with her.

00:39:33.920 I've confirmed it from other sources as well.

00:39:36.500 A couple of things.

00:39:37.760 One is she talked about the difficulty getting enough cases under your belt.

00:39:42.160 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.

00:39:51.420 So, um, this, I could not believe, uh, one of the, 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, uh, a log of the cases you have done in the course of your residency program.

00:40:12.760 So they list, you know, every case you've done as a surgeon, as an assistant and whatnot.

00:40:18.260 Well, they're now permitted to list operations in there as part of the surgical experience that they've only watched.

00:40:26.760 So if they sit behind the anesthesia screen or look over the shoulder of the surgeon, um, and watch an operation, they can list that in the logbook as part of their surgical experience.

00:40:39.080 And I can tell you personally that you don't learn surgery that way.

00:40:42.140 You learn about getting your hands in there.

00:40:43.620 I've watched a lot of medical shows.

00:40:45.360 I'm not a doctor as a result of like that's.

00:40:47.660 And, and that's what's scary.

00:40:49.320 And, and that allows them to, to qualify for taking their boards.

00:40:53.300 The other thing they do, which is really.

00:40:55.000 What would be, again, the motive there?

00:40:56.580 Why would you allow that?

00:40:59.220 Well, the ACS has already anticipated there's going to be a shortage of 19,000 surgeons by 2030.

00:41:06.400 Five years from now, we're going to be shy on nearly 20,000 surgeons in this country.

00:41:10.220 Right now, the USA is short 1,200 trauma surgeons.

00:41:14.860 There are places that need a trauma surgeon that can't get one because they're just not around.

00:41:19.100 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.

00:41:28.940 Um, the, the, gosh, this, there's so much to this, Tucker, that, that goes into this.

00:41:36.480 Um, well, back, back to the, I mean, all, all of this begins at the front end of the pipeline, which is medical school.

00:41:44.380 So, yes.

00:41:45.600 So, the standards for admission to medical school have been dropped dramatically for race reasons.

00:41:52.140 Mm-hmm.

00:41:52.660 Yeah.

00:41:53.000 Yeah, they've, they've taken the, the medical licensee examination, the three-part medical licensee examination, taking it from a graded exam to a pass-fail.

00:42:02.180 And to pass it, you only have to be in above the bottom 5% in grade.

00:42:08.280 If you, if you are above the bottom 5%, you are going to pass the medical licensee examinations.

00:42:13.780 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.

00:42:27.580 And a number of them flunk these exams two and three times.

00:42:30.920 And yet, they're still being put through medical school.

00:42:33.640 They don't want to drop you.

00:42:35.000 I know what I wanted to say.

00:42:36.060 Again, back to the DEI for a second.

00:42:40.300 If you're an attending in a surgical training program and you have a surgeon that is inadequate, he's just not cutting it.

00:42:49.980 And I, I saw this.

00:42:51.420 I, I had, and while I was in training, there were surgeons or people that came into the program that were dropped after a year or two because it was clear that they weren't going to be able to do it.

00:43:00.080 They just didn't have the dexterity.

00:43:02.300 They didn't have the whatever.

00:43:03.500 Today, if you do that and you, 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.

00:43:19.160 They'll get reported to the DEI establishment in that program.

00:43:24.520 And invariably, they're going to side with the resident and not with the attending.

00:43:29.020 Why do they have the moral high ground if they're putting people's lives at risk, which they are?

00:43:32.300 I mean, I think that's a crime, but how did they get to attack you for upholding objective standards of surgery?

00:43:40.420 I just don't get the, like, are there, are there no sane people left in American medicine?

00:43:45.080 Well, the thing is this, how do you recognize the quality going down?

00:43:48.880 How do you recognize bad surgery?

00:43:50.620 And one way that you recognize that is by complications.

00:43:54.280 So, the question would be, are people dying?

00:43:58.160 Are complications going up, okay, in surgery?

00:44:02.460 Right now, you can't answer that question.

00:44:05.280 And one big reason why you can't answer the question is that, at least, and I'll just say, this is my opinion.

00:44:11.500 I can't keep quoting this, but I know this is how surgery has evolved.

00:44:15.120 The vast majority of surgery done today is done as an outpatient.

00:44:19.360 So, you know, the people that are in the hospital and have an operation are not the majority.

00:44:25.080 They're the minority.

00:44:26.720 So, if you do outpatient surgery, you do the operation, you know, the patient goes home that day or after an overnight stay.

00:44:34.560 Most complications don't arise immediately, you know.

00:44:38.040 Bleeding occurs in the first day or two after.

00:44:40.300 Infections, three, four days, okay.

00:44:42.620 Pulmonary problems.

00:44:43.580 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.

00:44:52.180 So, when you do have complications, they occur after the patient's out of the system, so to speak, out of the hospital system.

00:44:58.420 So, there's no required reporting.

00:45:01.820 It's all self-reporting.

00:45:03.500 You know, you get a letter, you know, periodically from the hospital to say, hey, can you please tell us how all of your patients did?

00:45:08.920 Do you have any complications?

00:45:10.980 They did great.

00:45:11.980 And it's human nature.

00:45:13.860 Of course.

00:45:14.500 If a patient gets an infection, you treat them with antibiotics, you know, do you report that as a complication?

00:45:19.240 And the patient ultimately did okay.

00:45:20.720 You could argue, you know, you would probably, you might not report that, and you could rationalize that it's okay.

00:45:28.080 So, that's one of the issues.

00:45:29.840 The other issue, and I got this directly from one of the examiners.

00:45:32.760 I know someone who has been examining surgeons for 15 years for their boards.

00:45:38.360 So, when you go to take your board examinations, say, he's one of the people that sits in the room and asks you questions and whatnot.

00:45:44.420 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.

00:45:56.220 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.

00:46:05.000 These are cases you've done since you've been out.

00:46:07.940 You know, when you finish your residency, you're allowed to go out and practice.

00:46:11.260 I could practice.

00:46:11.960 I practiced for two years before I became board certified because it took two years to get my board certification.

00:46:17.120 So, of course, I have to be able to practice.

00:46:18.580 And I'm regarded at that point as a board-eligible surgeon, and I'm entitled to full privileges and all those things.

00:46:26.240 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.

00:46:34.980 And they select cases to examine you on and so forth.

00:46:38.620 It's an interesting experience to do that.

00:46:41.240 So, these are the cases that these examiners are looking at, and he's saying, they're taking way too long.

00:46:45.980 You know, here's an operation that should normally take three to four hours.

00:46:48.780 It's taking seven to eight hours for this person to complete this operation.

00:46:51.540 And I've seen this locally.

00:46:52.480 I've seen this in my own community where, you know, nurses who know the good surgeons from the bad surgeons say, Dr. So-and-so, he's so slow.

00:47:00.680 He just takes forever to do, you know, this operation.

00:47:04.500 And complications are directly tied to length of surgery.

00:47:08.020 I mean, absolutely, positively correlated.

00:47:11.800 The longer the surgery, the more potential complications.

00:47:13.720 Exactly.

00:47:14.200 And this is recognized, and it's recognized in a very interesting way.

00:47:17.920 The CMS, the Centers for Medicine, Medicare and Medicaid.

00:47:24.360 Right, exactly.

00:47:26.240 They've come out, and they said, we are not going to pay for anesthesia beyond a certain time.

00:47:32.480 So, if we have, for example, a breast reduction, which for me is about a three and a half to four hour operation.

00:47:39.380 You know, we'll pay for four hours of anesthesia for breast reduction. 1.00

00:47:42.360 If it goes beyond that, we're not paying for that additional time.

00:47:46.400 And the idea is they recognize that, you know, people are taking too long to do these things.

00:47:53.600 Point is, anesthesia has nothing to do with the length of surgery.

00:47:56.940 They're just there to keep the patient asleep and stable and alive for you while you're doing an operation.

00:48:01.140 But 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.

00:48:11.260 And so, they recognize this, and this goes back to what I said.

00:48:15.020 You know, a lot of surgeons are not getting enough surgical experience to be able to operate, one, independently, and two, I would say, you know, efficiently, competently, you know, to do.

00:48:25.580 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.

00:48:33.560 And I've never tried to be the fastest guy on the block.

00:48:37.300 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.

00:48:46.120 And patients don't know that.

00:48:47.820 And that's the other reason why I'm here, Tucker.

00:48:50.740 I want this to be a wake-up call to my fellow surgeons.

00:48:53.460 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.

00:49:09.640 And I would love for there to be a groundswell of surgeons coming in and saying, hey, wait a minute, what's going on in my profession?

00:49:16.300 Well, the fact that there isn't really bothers me because it's more than physical dexterity you're counting on as a patient reason.

00:49:25.320 You want a fact-based, logical physician or else you could die.

00:49:31.560 And so anyone who accepts clearly illogical, unreasonable suppositions and doesn't push back against them is basically involved in witchcraft, right? 0.99

00:49:45.080 So if I could say to you something that is provably untrue and just on its face stupid, which is, you know, a black female patient needs a black female doctor. 1.00

00:49:55.440 It's like, what are you even saying? 1.00

00:49:57.060 Show me the evidence.

00:49:58.020 There is no evidence.

00:49:59.060 It's crazy on its face. 0.67

00:50:00.040 It's Nazi stuff. 0.77

00:50:01.740 If you go along with that, then you've disqualified yourself because you're not a rational person. 0.92

00:50:07.740 You're a witchcraft practitioner. 0.98

00:50:09.700 So that just freaks me out.

00:50:12.680 So you could say, well, good people are going along with this.

00:50:15.040 Well, no, they're disqualified by the fact they are going along with it.

00:50:18.580 That's my, as a patient, someone who's undergone two surgeries.

00:50:22.980 That's, I mean, is that a fair view, do you think?

00:50:25.020 Absolutely.

00:50:25.800 I mean, think about this.

00:50:26.660 You're an intelligent person.

00:50:28.740 You have probably a wealth of experience because of what you do.

00:50:31.920 You weren't aware of racial concordance.

00:50:36.200 And, I mean, you ask any guy on the street about that.

00:50:38.900 They're going to just look at you like, you know, you have two heads. 0.84

00:50:41.140 What the heck is that?

00:50:42.100 Well, is it true?

00:50:43.420 And if it's true, how is that true?

00:50:45.640 Again, the rest of us trust science, not because we trust the people who carry it out,

00:50:51.780 but because the idea itself is inherently reasonable.

00:50:54.900 Prove it or I don't believe it.

00:50:57.140 It, the burden of proof is on the practitioner, the scientist, the physician, the surgeon.

00:51:03.000 And the whole system is based on that.

00:51:04.720 If you can't prove it, then you can't know it.

00:51:06.280 I thought that that's science, right?

00:51:07.700 Well, that's what they call evidence-based medicine, which is.

00:51:10.080 Well, right.

00:51:10.860 Yeah, yeah.

00:51:11.700 But that's all medicine should be evidence-based medicine.

00:51:14.160 And if it's not evidence-based medicine, it's not really medicine, it's witchcraft.

00:51:17.060 So it freaks me out that the average doctor, average surgeon would, for a second, go along with this.

00:51:25.340 Well, think about it from this standpoint, too.

00:51:27.860 Think about the, for example, Celia Nelson, the female Jamaican black surgeon that was on the Zoom call with me.

00:51:35.340 She's worked as hard as anybody to get to where she is.

00:51:40.300 She's an excellent surgeon. 0.98

00:51:42.000 I mean, she's been through, she's experienced racism.

00:51:45.320 And she'll tell you flat out, yeah, when she first arrived there, people wouldn't mistake her for, you know,

00:51:50.760 asked her to get a cup of coffee and the surgeon went, you know, those sorts of things. 0.74

00:51:53.600 And she also noticed that sometimes when she'd walk into an examining room in the emergency room,

00:52:00.080 that, you know, the look she would get was, you know, who is this?

00:52:04.740 Is this someone good?

00:52:06.360 And she's worked through all that, okay?

00:52:08.180 She's worked through that.

00:52:09.160 She just put her head down.

00:52:10.780 She worked hard.

00:52:11.460 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.

00:52:21.260 She's going to be in there to see them.

00:52:23.120 So, I mean, she's earned her place, okay?

00:52:26.040 But think how unfair it is for the people coming up now, the minority, if you will, surgeons that have to face this idea when they go into a room,

00:52:36.940 that person may look at them and say, gee, is this a DEI hire or is this a person that really-

00:52:41.600 I think everyone thinks that.

00:52:42.640 That went through, that got here because of their excellence, because of their excellent academic performance in college and medical school,

00:52:50.520 because of their excellent performance in their residency, because they met all the standards,

00:52:56.000 the standards that everyone should have to meet.

00:52:59.000 Or am I getting someone who's a little bit less because of this?

00:53:04.140 And that's part of the inference of it.

00:53:05.640 You're getting someone less, overwhelmingly, and that's obvious.

00:53:10.140 And it has nothing to do with race, by the way.

00:53:12.120 It's that preferences are always destructive of excellence.

00:53:16.420 So, if you tell me that you're the CEO of a company that your family owns and you got the job because you're the first son,

00:53:25.420 my first assumption is they lowered standards to make you CEO.

00:53:30.520 I mean, right?

00:53:31.760 It's obvious.

00:53:32.800 And so, if I have a black female surgeon, my first assumption will be this person had to meet lower standards 1.00

00:53:39.760 because the school or the certifying board was so anxious to say we have a black female surgeon. 1.00

00:53:44.920 And, of course, it's unfair to the individual, but then the whole system is unfair.

00:53:48.520 So, should you be shocked that it produces unfair results?

00:53:51.440 No.

00:53:52.020 I mean, it's unfair.

00:53:53.200 It is unfair.

00:53:53.900 On the face of it and in practice and every other possible way.

00:53:57.460 Yes.

00:53:57.740 You know, the thing about anti-racism that was so, I think, despicable was it said that, you know, you cannot be against racism.

00:54:07.640 You have to be for this whole anti-racism shtick. 0.86

00:54:11.480 Attacking whites. 0.98

00:54:12.240 Yeah. 0.52

00:54:13.540 So, you know, if you claim to be not a racist, that's a racist statement.

00:54:19.600 I mean, talk about the... 0.61

00:54:22.200 But why would anyone go, well, of course, I mean, it's a Chinese finger trap. 1.00

00:54:26.200 Yeah.

00:54:26.500 You know, the harder you pull to get out, the more stuck you are.

00:54:28.440 But why would anybody, you're a surgeon, like you're at the very pinnacle of our system, like the science-based, reason-based civilization that we've built, which we consider superior to like, you know, to the witchcraft-based societies of the rest of the world.

00:54:47.400 How in the world could you sit and let this happen?

00:54:50.680 Anybody, any surgeon.

00:54:53.080 Well, I'll tell you why I did it.

00:54:55.800 I was too busy.

00:54:56.560 I was just, I had my head in the sand.

00:54:58.820 Well, you're the anomaly.

00:54:59.700 You actually stood up and got banned for standing up.

00:55:01.460 I'm just saying, what about all your colleagues?

00:55:03.120 Well, I'm fortunate in the sense that I was able to get through a career, and I'm at the twilight of my career.

00:55:09.380 No, actually, at the end of my career.

00:55:11.200 I have nothing to lose, Tucker.

00:55:12.900 I mean, they can't hurt me.

00:55:14.440 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.

00:55:25.840 Because we're going to get pushed back.

00:55:27.560 You know, we're going to be called, you know, Uncle Toms or racist or whatever if we agree with the premise that you're putting out there.

00:55:36.000 I don't have much to lose.

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00:56:47.700 No, I mean, of course, I know that you're describing the real answer.

00:56:50.500 That is the answer.

00:56:51.760 But it's just hard to let people like that off the hook.

00:56:54.680 If you work in some, you know, normal company, it's one thing.

00:56:57.660 But if you're a surgeon, you understand that lowering standards results in the deaths of people.

00:57:04.020 The stakes are just the highest in any part of our society.

00:57:07.500 You have the highest stakes.

00:57:09.700 So, sure, it could hurt your career.

00:57:12.020 Sure, it could make you unpopular.

00:57:13.380 Sure, they might call you names, Uncle Tom or whatever.

00:57:15.980 But you balance that against the deaths of innocence, and you think, I have to say something, don't you?

00:57:21.240 And if you don't—

00:57:21.940 That's where I found myself.

00:57:22.660 Then you're—I can tell.

00:57:24.040 Yeah.

00:57:24.240 And bless you.

00:57:25.740 But if you decide, you know, people will die, but my career is more important, or not being called names is more important, then it's kind of a monster, aren't you?

00:57:35.000 I don't want to say that.

00:57:36.320 Well, I do.

00:57:37.280 I do.

00:57:37.980 I think that if you give the power that surgeons have, the power to cut people open unsupervised, and someone dies, and you're the surgeon.

00:57:46.780 You're like God in the operating room.

00:57:48.580 You have that power.

00:57:49.720 In exchange for that power, you have to hold yourself to the highest moral standards, don't you?

00:57:54.880 I agree with that.

00:57:56.940 You'll get no argument from me.

00:57:58.240 Who has more power than a surgeon?

00:58:00.060 Nobody.

00:58:00.760 Yeah.

00:58:01.080 In that immediate moment, nobody does.

00:58:03.000 That's what I'm saying.

00:58:03.740 I mean, actual power, not theoretical power.

00:58:05.920 No.

00:58:06.160 A surgeon has more power than the president.

00:58:07.820 He can cut open a person if the person's unconscious.

00:58:10.720 He has total control over his operating room.

00:58:12.600 Correct me if I'm wrong in any of this.

00:58:13.940 The captain of the ship, basically.

00:58:17.120 Unquestioned, right?

00:58:18.360 So, and he has a life in his hands.

00:58:21.120 Like actual, not theoretical, actual, beating heart person.

00:58:24.200 And so, that person has to be of just the highest moral caliber, or else, in essence, die.

00:58:31.580 I mean, that's my view.

00:58:33.280 Anything which works against that, you have to fight.

00:58:36.220 I think you have to work against that.

00:58:39.680 It's disconcerting to me.

00:58:41.420 I have to say, maybe I could use stronger terms, but I get a lot of private affirmation from colleagues, from surgeons.

00:58:50.000 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.

00:59:01.180 However, some of them, a few agree with the whole situation, crazy as it may be, all the DEI and so forth.

00:59:08.140 And most of them were kind of like me.

00:59:10.100 They were just going along and too busy taking care of their patients to the best of their ability.

00:59:13.780 I understand that.

00:59:14.440 And, 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.

00:59:26.640 This is not the field of medicine that I went into.

00:59:31.480 And, you know, you'd like to think when you've devoted your life to a career, a profession, that you're going to leave it a little better than you got it.

00:59:42.220 You know, I'm building my, 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.

00:59:58.140 And you want to think that you've done somewhat the same.

01:00:00.820 Now, I'm not, I wasn't a professor, I wasn't a researcher, 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.

01:00:13.440 Well, I've got a generation behind me now.

01:00:15.540 I've got a daughter who's a physician.

01:00:17.420 I've got a son-in-law, her husband, who's a physician.

01:00:19.460 And I feel a very strong sense of obligation 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.

01:00:32.500 And I can't say that.

01:00:34.020 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.

01:00:45.840 Yeah, this is not progress.

01:00:47.540 I take responsibility for that.

01:00:49.240 I take my own, but at the same time, I think it's what happened to me.

01:00:53.540 If they can, 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.

01:01:12.400 I mean, there's nobody out there who's safe.

01:01:15.020 And that's a pretty frightening proposition.

01:01:16.680 And, you know, for those of us watching who, you know, aren't doctors, it eliminates all trust.

01:01:24.480 Don't trust doctors.

01:01:25.320 I don't want to go to the doctor.

01:01:26.240 I don't like doctors. 0.97

01:01:27.080 I loathe them.

01:01:27.900 I don't trust a lot of doctors. 0.77

01:01:29.380 You don't.

01:01:29.900 I don't.

01:01:30.740 Why?

01:01:31.180 My trust, COVID.

01:01:32.980 Yeah.

01:01:34.600 Me too.

01:01:35.260 I haven't been a doctor since COVID.

01:01:36.460 And 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.

01:01:48.500 And the other issue, I don't want to open a can of worms here, but the gender affirming care.

01:01:53.680 I mean, how in God's name did we get to a point where you have, in 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.

01:02:08.960 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.

01:02:17.860 Proplastic surgery.

01:02:18.440 I mean, that is, when you talk about witchcraft and voodoo, that is witchcraft and voodoo. 0.98

01:02:22.520 And all the scientific evidence is against it.

01:02:25.200 Do you know anyone who participates in it?

01:02:28.080 Oh, yeah.

01:02:28.820 Yeah.

01:02:29.160 Yeah.

01:02:29.420 You know people personally?

01:02:30.160 Now, I don't know people that are doing the gender affirming care in minors.

01:02:35.240 And I want to be very clear.

01:02:36.420 You know, if an adult thinks, if an adult male man thinks he's a woman and God bless them, I feel sorry for them.

01:02:43.600 Me too.

01:02:43.860 You really have to.

01:02:45.600 But they're, you know, they're a adult with agency to make decisions for themselves.

01:02:49.980 That's one thing.

01:02:51.140 Minors is a whole different thing.

01:02:52.920 Have you met any plastic surgeons who've done surgeries on minors?

01:02:57.340 Not that I know of personally, no.

01:02:59.580 I know some that are doing some of this, what they call, euphemistically, top surgery where they take off a breast. 0.98

01:03:05.120 But they're doing this in women that are adults. 1.00

01:03:08.780 They're taking off their breasts to turn them into, you know, make them look more male-like. 1.00

01:03:13.420 I don't know anyone personally who's done this on children so far.

01:03:16.140 So you saw this with abortion.

01:03:17.440 Even when I was a child, there were doctors who said, you know, I just don't believe in it.

01:03:21.440 I think it's immoral.

01:03:22.220 I'm not participating in it.

01:03:23.160 But now it's my impression that it's pretty hard to be a doctor unless you commit abortion. 0.55

01:03:27.320 Like, you kind of have to as part of your training if you're an OBGYN.

01:03:31.220 I don't know that you can get through medical school without participating in an abortion, an elective abortion.

01:03:36.600 I can't speak to that because I think that there – I mean, I know from personally that that wasn't the case.

01:03:41.460 I'm aware it was not the case.

01:03:42.900 No, I know that.

01:03:43.600 But my sense is now in practice, if not officially, that is the case.

01:03:50.160 And it's extremely hard to be an OBGYN resident and not participate in that.

01:03:57.300 And I wonder if we're moving toward that scenario with transgender surgery where maybe you don't get certified as a plastic surgeon unless you participate in, you know, mutilating minors in the service of ideology. 1.00

01:04:13.600 Like, could you see that happening?

01:04:16.060 Oh, I could definitely see it happening.

01:04:17.640 I mean, it is happening.

01:04:18.660 It is being done.

01:04:20.100 Now, are people being forced to do it?

01:04:22.160 I don't think that's necessarily – I think people that are doing it are bought into the whole thing.

01:04:27.100 And they're doing that because they're bought into it.

01:04:29.740 But that just seems to act against evidence, scientific evidence as a scientist, physicians or scientists.

01:04:39.300 It doesn't – I just – I'm saying the same thing 10 times in a row, but it just seems like it –

01:04:43.160 Like, you shouldn't be allowed to conduct science if you've shown that you don't believe in it.

01:04:48.840 As a resident in surgery, 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.

01:05:00.460 You can't pick and choose what you're going to do.

01:05:02.300 When I was in training, we had an experimental clinical study going on to do bariatric weight reduction surgery.

01:05:13.700 Yes.

01:05:14.600 We were approaching these bypasses through the chest and not the abdomen.

01:05:19.660 Yep.

01:05:20.980 And the attendings in our program came to us.

01:05:26.040 The residents said, listen, we understand this is an experimental program.

01:05:30.540 We're not going to make you do this.

01:05:32.260 We'll let you decide for yourselves if you want to do these cases.

01:05:35.900 There were three of us at my level.

01:05:37.600 And two of us said, no, I was one of those.

01:05:41.960 And the third one said, sure, he'd do it.

01:05:43.660 That you did not want to participate.

01:05:45.180 Did not want to do that.

01:05:46.060 I didn't think it was a good operation, a good idea.

01:05:49.300 Long and short of that, the study showed that, yes, you could lose weight by doing this, but the weight came back.

01:05:57.560 Yes.

01:05:57.800 These patients gained weight again.

01:05:59.120 And so it was pretty much abandoned.

01:06:01.700 And we're talking, you know, back in 1984, thereabouts.

01:06:07.520 And, of course, I remember one young woman who died, you know, directly as a result of the operation, which was pretty, it wasn't that big a group of patients.

01:06:15.320 And they had one death in that group.

01:06:17.460 So, you know, you're not always allowed to make the decision about what you could do.

01:06:20.880 Now, if you're in a residency program and you've got surgeons that are doing, you know, gender-affirming surgery, and, again, in minors, and you don't want to participate in that, I can't speak to this.

01:06:32.680 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.

01:06:38.120 I do know that, you know, are you familiar with the case of Eitan Heim?

01:06:42.820 I've interviewed him.

01:06:43.940 Oh, okay.

01:06:44.740 What a man he is.

01:06:46.440 One of my heroes.

01:06:47.520 He is.

01:06:48.440 Now, there's someone who has true courage.

01:06:49.680 I mean, my courage is the courage of someone that doesn't have too much to lose.

01:06:52.700 His is the courage of someone who has everything to lose.

01:06:54.440 That guy, I don't know if he's, I didn't ask him, I don't know if he's a religious man, but I could feel a moral power on that guy.

01:07:02.260 He is religious.

01:07:02.900 Okay.

01:07:03.980 I've spoken, I've become friends with him, and I've actually, I 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.

01:07:17.740 Yes.

01:07:17.980 And it just happened to be when he was in a really difficult down period and just needed someone to affirm what he was doing and to encourage him and so forth.

01:07:28.960 And so, you know, I just happened to be the person that made that phone call.

01:07:34.140 Oh, good for you.

01:07:34.800 And so, we've become friends.

01:07:36.840 Good for you.

01:07:37.460 And he is a, definitely a religious person.

01:07:40.020 Good.

01:07:40.280 I could feel that on him.

01:07:42.520 And more than that, he's a moral person.

01:07:44.760 He has a strong sense of...

01:07:45.660 One follows the other.

01:07:46.900 No, you're absolutely right.

01:07:48.140 And of all the people I've interviewed, boy, it's funny you mentioned him.

01:07:50.600 I've thought about him many times since that interview.

01:07:53.080 No, he's still in the thick of it.

01:07:54.340 And he's still under indictment.

01:07:55.520 And he's still facing trial.

01:07:57.040 And...

01:07:57.100 He's going to win.

01:07:58.040 Oh, he'll win.

01:07:59.420 Well, my suspicion is it's all going to be dropped.

01:08:02.700 Because the reasons that have been brought to, the accusations are so out there that they just can't...

01:08:10.540 Eitan Heim.

01:08:11.160 E-T-A-N? 1.00

01:08:13.780 E-I-T-H-A-N-H-A-I-M. 1.00

01:08:16.100 Eitan.

01:08:16.660 Eitan Heim.

01:08:17.520 Eitan Heim.

01:08:18.580 For those following who want to Google him.

01:08:20.520 Yeah.

01:08:20.740 Yeah.

01:08:22.440 So, do you think that this can be fixed?

01:08:26.000 It can be fixed, yes.

01:08:29.520 But, you're talking about a long...

01:08:32.460 The pipeline for surgery is five plus years.

01:08:36.080 So, you know, and then you've got the four years before the medical school.

01:08:38.740 So, if you're going to fix the problem, you've got to go back to the medical schools.

01:08:42.720 Honestly, you may have to go back to universities where people are being indoctrinated in all this social justice stuff.

01:08:48.460 Where they feel that that's more important than what they're doing.

01:08:51.440 And, you know, the young doctors think that righting historic wrongs is more important than taking care of the patient in front of them.

01:08:58.500 And you can't practice medicine that way.

01:09:00.380 That's just not...

01:09:01.300 That's not medicine.

01:09:03.420 So, it can be fixed.

01:09:05.180 It's going to be a generational problem.

01:09:07.460 It's going to take a long time.

01:09:08.600 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.

01:09:17.100 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.

01:09:24.960 And I don't know who I'm going to go to.

01:09:27.300 I somewhat semi-seriously told friends and family, I said, don't go to a surgeon or a doctor under 40.

01:09:35.100 Because they've been indoctrinated.

01:09:38.060 Some of these guys are still wearing masks, for Pete's sakes.

01:09:40.840 Masks?

01:09:41.260 Oh, yeah.

01:09:41.840 There's some physicians that still mask, you know, patients and things like that.

01:09:44.700 It's just crazy.

01:09:45.640 There's crazy stuff out there. 0.99

01:09:46.820 So, if you're a doctor, I mean, and you're openly mentally ill like that, why doesn't anybody... 0.98

01:09:52.560 No, I don't mean that as an attack. 0.94

01:09:55.120 I'm saying that with sympathy.

01:09:56.540 But if you have...

01:09:57.160 It's a great question.

01:09:58.400 Why doesn't anyone in the physician's group or the hospital say something?

01:10:03.340 Well, first off, there's too few doctors.

01:10:05.940 I mean, there's so few that, you know, a lot of these guys, guys, you know, men, women, whatever.

01:10:10.820 A lot of doctors are there because there's just not enough doctors.

01:10:15.500 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.

01:10:22.800 You need something more urgently?

01:10:24.680 Good luck with that.

01:10:25.560 You know, you'll probably end up going to an urgent 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.

01:10:34.360 Um, so it's, it's not a real, there's not a simple cure for all of this.

01:10:43.200 Um, one thing I wanted to, to try to do, um, with this conversation is not just simply bad mouth, you know, my organization, the ACS or bad mouth medicine or surgery, because I'm devastated by what's happened.

01:10:59.380 I, I really want, I want surgery to be elevated to where it should be, which is a, a, a very highly regarded profession, uh, that is dedicated, uh, itself to taking care of all comers, regardless.

01:11:12.800 Okay.

01:11:13.000 We don't, you know, we don't judge on, 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.

01:11:19.560 So, my solutions, you know, my first solution, obviously, is get DEI out of medicine.

01:11:25.820 Politics and, and, and etiology do not belong in medicine.

01:11:28.720 I mean, the-

01:11:29.700 The Soviets proved that. 1.00

01:11:32.080 I mean, the idea that, you know, you can take care of a patient if your first, you know, uh, priority is to judge them based on their, their color, ethnicity is, is counter to everything that Hippocratic medicine is all about.

01:11:45.680 Uh, the other is to reinstall standards of excellence.

01:11:48.660 We have to, we have to quit lowering the bar.

01:11:50.940 We got to start elevating the bar again and requiring that, you know, doctors and prospective, uh, uh, doctors meet, you know, minimum standards.

01:12:00.660 You know, there have to be some minimum, but they have to be higher than the lower 5% for Pete's sakes.

01:12:05.160 They can't be that.

01:12:06.260 We have to free, you know, the doctors in training to do what they have to do.

01:12:11.720 You can't have restricted hours when you've got such limited time anyway in, in the overall, you know, a course of a person's lifetime, you know, three, four, five years in surgery is the drop in the bucket.

01:12:26.540 I mean, to, to ask a surgeon to devote themselves to learning the craft and what they call the art and the science of surgery, you know, not only do you need the time, you need the, the person to apply themselves.

01:12:40.020 One thing I heard, which again is, uh, kind of disturbing is that a lot of young surgeons are more concerned about comfort, you know, uh, work-life balance as it's often called, uh, as opposed to learning to be the best doctor they can be.

01:12:56.440 They want to know how much time off they have.

01:12:58.500 They want, they, they're very jealous of their time off, you know, five o'clock rolls around, they're done.

01:13:03.120 They check out and they move out.

01:13:04.320 Uh, one thing that they found, uh, in, uh, asking all the program directors about, uh, the surgeons coming into their fellowships was that, uh, a large proportion did not have ownership of their patients.

01:13:17.300 And ownership means that, you know, you take that patient as your patient.

01:13:20.940 That's, that's not just someone that you take care of for a 12 hour shift and then you turn them over to the next person.

01:13:26.240 And then, you know, you may not ever see that patient again or not until, you know, two or three shifts later, you know?

01:13:32.060 So a lot of young doctors don't have ownership for their patient.

01:13:35.100 I'm hearing that from, from colleagues.

01:13:37.100 So how do you treat a rental car?

01:13:38.220 Do you ever change the oil in it?

01:13:40.780 No, I don't.

01:13:41.560 I don't rotate the tires.

01:13:42.820 I don't tune it up.

01:13:43.660 That's exactly right.

01:13:44.480 Yeah.

01:13:46.140 Well, you've certainly wrecked my day, doctor, but I appreciate you're doing this, taking all the time to explain this.

01:13:51.120 We still have a good medical system.

01:13:53.180 It's probably still, in many respects, the best in the world.

01:13:56.000 I have to believe that, but it's in disarray and it's definitely, I believe, in decline.

01:14:04.000 And I believe that it's going to take some, some effort, some will from people that are willing to, to make those difficult changes.

01:14:13.460 Well, thank you for your bravery.

01:14:14.700 I don't consider myself brave, but I appreciate that.

01:14:18.700 Appreciate the thought.

01:14:19.500 Thank you.

01:14:19.940 Well, nobody else is.

01:14:21.040 And, and I can't thank you enough for giving me a pedestal in which to, to speak.

01:14:26.320 Yeah, I had an emergency appendectomy once by Dr. Leon Pachter.

01:14:30.880 It was an amazing surgeon and it, you know, it saved me.

01:14:34.300 So, and I think most people have had an experience like that.

01:14:37.200 And, you know, it's important.

01:14:39.580 Pulling you with an interesting little factoid.

01:14:41.200 Yeah.

01:14:41.780 Ibram Kendi, the, the author of Anti-Racism.

01:14:44.260 Not a surgeon.

01:14:45.080 Not a surgeon.

01:14:45.760 He's an author of Anti-Racism. 1.00

01:14:46.920 A moron. 1.00

01:14:47.740 Yeah. 1.00

01:14:48.280 He had colon cancer.

01:14:49.500 Yeah.

01:14:49.880 And, and he, uh, reported that he went to, he interviewed several surgeons, black surgeons, showed the white surgeon for his surgery because he was the most competent.

01:14:58.800 Shouldn't be allowed.

01:15:01.340 Nope.

01:15:01.980 You get the surgeon from Burkina Fossa, Ibram Kendi.

01:15:05.760 That's my opinion.

01:15:07.300 Thank you, doctor.

01:15:08.220 But I'm obviously a vindictive bad person.

01:15:10.460 So, um, anyway.

01:15:11.280 Thanks.

01:15:12.100 I appreciate it.

01:15:13.160 Appreciate the time.

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The Tucker Carlson Show - February 28, 2025

Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth： Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.

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