Read the full transcript of Dr. Richard Bosshardt’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show titled “Surgeons No Longer Need to Be Good, They Just Can’t Be White” premiered on February 28, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Beginning of the Conflict
TUCKER CARLSON: So let me ask you. You in 2022 became famous for a day or two because you got into it with the American College of Surgeons?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I’m still into it with them. Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: You’re still into it with them? It’s approaching its third year. Its third year. Can you just give us a quick reminder of what that controversy was about? What happened?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Sure. I am a surgeon. I’m a plastic surgeon, but I was a general surgeon for a while. One of the things that I did after I became a surgeon was to apply for fellowship in the American College of Surgeons, which is an honorary sort of a thing to have attached to yourself. If you become a fellow, you’re allowed to put the letters FACS after your name. And that’s something I sought to do.
So I became a fellow of the ACS, the American College of Surgeons, and went along for thirty-plus years as a practicing surgeon doing my thing. And then what happened was in around 2018, 2019, you could say I woke up. I realized that there was something going on in my area of surgery.
The Shift Away from Excellence
It began with a transcript of a lecture by an invited lecturer to the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress that they have every year. The lecture was titled “A Pathway to Diversity, Inclusion, and Excellence.” That was the title of the lecture. And for reasons that I can’t explain, I read it. I wouldn’t normally have done that, but I read the entire transcript. I read it twice and not once was excellence mentioned in there.
So I wrote a commentary that was actually published in the bulletin of the ACS where I expressed some concerns about taking down excellence as the primary directive for surgeons and replacing it with diversity inclusion. At that time, equity wasn’t thrown in there yet. And that commentary didn’t really do much.
The George Floyd Effect
So fast forward a couple of years, and you have COVID, which is its own thing, and then you have the George Floyd killing. And I think you could realistically say that the country went crazy after George Floyd. I mean, everything from riots and whatnot to this mass movement to adopt the idea that the country was systemically racist, and every institution, every organization was racist, and we had to radically transform the country. And the American College of Surgeons was no different.
They jumped right on that bandwagon. And within weeks after the George Floyd killing, I mean, literally weeks, they had assembled a task force on racism, and they published this in the bulletin, which is their quarterly newsletter. And the bulletin basically said that they were doing this to deal with racism in the ACS. It wasn’t like, is there racism in the ACS? It was there is racism, and we need to figure that out.
TUCKER CARLSON: Like, refusing to operate on black people?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Not well, that would be pretty extreme. No. No. I’m joking.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, like, where was the racism in surgery?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: It’s almost as bad, Tucker. The idea is that—well, let me take that step. They claimed that surgeons were racist, that the ACS itself was racist, and that the practice of surgery was racist.
And the reason why they made that last claim was because there are known disparities. We know that the outcomes for surgery are not as good statistically for—we’ll just call it black and white because it just makes it easier to deal with—that is not as good for blacks as it is for whites. And so the idea is that there’s some element of racism or discrimination that impacts the outcome of surgery.
Of course, if you take that to the next step, it means that blacks are not getting as good care. Their surgery is not being done as well and whatever. There’s a whole lot of reasons why you can have disparate outcomes, but this was the one reason that they latched onto, and they have never let go.
Racial Concordance in Surgery
And then have you heard of the term racial concordance?
TUCKER CARLSON: No.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Okay. That’s a really important concept, and this is something that’s being promoted by the ACS. The ACS has explicitly stated that blacks would do better if their surgeon is black. Simple as that. That’s racial concordance—that you are going to receive better care by a doctor, surgeon, or other doctor if they are of your same race, ethnicity, gender, that you might get better care if you’re a woman by a female surgeon, for example, and they’ve hung onto that as well.
TUCKER CARLSON: So that was the idea behind segregation in the south, of course.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Well, that’s the whole thing. They’re trying to redo their own—
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re trying to reinstall segregation into surgery, which when you think about it, is pretty despicable.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: So I get a white male surgeon is what you’re saying?
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. Okay. Well, you might need to get a white male surgeon of whatever your heritage is.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: You know, you might do better with—
TUCKER CARLSON: Kind of happy with the Swedish surgeons. Sorry. I’m going to win in this.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yeah. I need a Brazilian one because my mother is Brazilian.
TUCKER CARLSON: Meaning German, by the way.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yeah. Well, I’m half German, half Brazilian.
TUCKER CARLSON: There you go.
The DEI Transformation
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: So what happened was the task force came out with the recommendations at the end of 2020, and the recommendations were—oh my gosh. I mean, it’s just a litany.
So the recommendations were to add anti-racism, Abram Kendi’s anti-racism into the ACS values. They opened up a branded department of diversity, which had not existed before. And this is what they call a regental department, meaning that the head of that department, the clinical director, was now one of the members of the board of regents, had its own clinical director, its own executive director. Installed all these initiatives.
They started training their staff and even the leadership on things like microaggressions, implicit bias, ally, and active bystander, white privilege. And when I saw this, this is one that I guess it really hit me. I never thought I would be doing this at this point in my career. I’m retired. I’m three months retired from thirty-eight years as a surgeon. And to be an activist was never on my radar.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: But I couldn’t let this stand. It just really bothered me.
The Scientific Basis (or Lack Thereof)
TUCKER CARLSON: And may I ask you to just go back to the core assumptions that drive this? Are they rooted in science?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Absolutely not.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. So is there any research at all that shows that the outcomes in surgery are better when the surgeon is matched racially with the patient?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Absolutely not. Do No Harm, the organization that I joined as a result of this whole issue, has actually published—you can go online and you can read it. They’ve done a systematic study. Well, actually, they’ve looked at five systematic studies of this issue. Does racial concordance, does concordance of ethnicity and race and so forth correlate to better outcomes in surgery? Short answer is no. There’s no scientific evidence that having a surgeon of your own race will provide better outcomes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Has there ever been evidence?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: No. So, I mean, just—let me qualify that. There was a study put out that’s been repeatedly referred to. I mean, even today, it’s been completely discredited. But a study showed that the survival rates for black babies is better if they have a black doctor with their obstetrician or whatever than if it’s not. And so they keep repeatedly referring to the study.
But if you look at the study, the study design is terribly flawed. The reviewer, if you’re familiar with Vinay Prasad, who is a data geek and very good at parsing clinical studies and so forth, came out to this study as catastrophically flawed. And even though this study does not by any stretch show that this is the case, it’s still referred to as the primary evidence for this idea that racial concordance is a real thing, and it’s still in the ACS.
TUCKER CARLSON: Were there any—was there any push to make certain that white patients got white doctors?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: When you say a push, but push by—
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m just being perverse. Like, did they really believe it when they said this? They didn’t really believe it. This is just a way to lower the standards to change the racial composition of surgeons. Right?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I think the only thing that’s pushing this is ideology. I think if you’re really science-based, you know, if you “follow the science” as the saying goes, if you look at that, you can’t possibly believe that. So either you have an ideology that supersedes factual science or you’re clueless, and you’re following whoever it is that’s taking the lead on this.
TUCKER CARLSON: And who was taking the lead in the American College of Surgeons?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I think it was a very—I can’t give you names. I could probably name a few people that I know that were instrumental in pushing against me, pushing back. But I think it’s a very small vocal group of very, very committed anti-racist or DEI zealots, and I think the others have gone along. I think some members of the ACS have really not researched this to the extent they understand it, and they kind of go along. Because it sounds—you know, DEI, diversity, equity, inclusions, sounds wonderful. Who would not be for those things?
TUCKER CARLSON: The rules in surgery? Like, if the other kids are for it, you just do it? You think not because—
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yeah. You would think not. Yes. That’s the thing that was so disconcerting to me.
Standing Up Against the Tide
Let me carry the story just a step further down the road. I wrote to the president of the ACS, and I expressed my concerns. And I’m a writer. Right? That’s—this is what I do. Talking is not my thing, but I love to write.
And I wrote a three-page single-spaced letter in which I outlined my concerns. Never got a response from that. And so the next thing I did was I actually posted on the ACS website, of course, and they have a thing called the communities, which is a forum for surgeons to communicate with one another. If you have a question, you can pose it, and surgeons will weigh in and provide advice or answers. If you have something you want, a topic you want to discuss, do the same thing.
So the largest forum is a general surgery forum. And so I posted on that forum, basically, that I was concerned about this rush to embrace anti-racism DEI in the ACS. And if this continued, I didn’t see how I could maintain my fellowship. I would drop my membership in the ACS, which is something I never imagined I would do because I’ve been a proud member of the ACS for over thirty years. And I’m not here to bash the ACS.
I want to be very clear about that. I’m still—I’m still FACS. I’m still a fellow. They consider me a fellow even though I’m permanently banned, which is kind of an interesting situation to be in.
And so I posted this thing saying that I would leave the ACS if this continued, and that generated a comment thread. And if you’re familiar with comment threads, if you look at the engagement in the comment thread, usually, it’s only about one to ten percent of people that are reading the comment thread that actually engage because that’s just the nature of things.
That comment thread ran for four months, and seventy-five individual surgeons and over a thousand comments. It broke the system, basically. I mean, they had to open up a second comment thread because they’d never had this much engagement on anything. And two-thirds of the surgeons that engaged weighed in in favor of my position as opposed to the ACS.
And I kept saying, why are we doing this? Tell me where the racism is. Let’s deal with the racism, but don’t just call us racist and go with that. And they repeatedly refused to do that.
TUCKER CARLSON: By the—who is they?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: This is the leadership of the ACS. This is my beef is not with the ACS, with my fellow surgeons. My beef is with the leadership of the ACS.
TUCKER CARLSON: Interesting just to hear if you can recall some of the names of the leadership who did that just for the record.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I don’t have any problem because it’s public record. The general secretary was a fellow named Tyler Hughes, just retired. Tyler Hughes. Yeah. General surgeon.
And he was the editor-in-chief of the communities, so he was kind of moderating. And then he would weigh in sometimes if it seemed like surgeons were getting a little bit too heated and so forth. And my position was, you know, we’re professionals. We’re surgeons, we’re opinionated. We’re not shrinking violets. We state our case. We’re certainly qualified to have conversations without a chaperone, and I didn’t really like the whole chaperoning thing that was going on.
And so this went forward. And as comment threads do, it kind of ran its life expectancy—really beyond what you’d think—four months. At which point, I was thinking, okay. So I did that. What do I do now? And I was waiting to see what my next step would be when the ACS leadership, the board of regents reached out to me. Tyler Hughes reached out to me and said, we’d like to have you on a Zoom call. This would happen in 2022.
The Conversation with Dr. Richard Bosshardt
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: 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, their clinical director of diversity. 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 Everlane, who is a very well known prominent surgeon in a big institution.
I had joined a group called FAIR (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. So I went to some of my colleagues in FAIR and said, “Hey, listen. I’m invited to the Zoom call. How do you think I should prepare for this?” The question they said is, “Don’t go by yourself because you’re going to get jumped on.” I said, “Okay, sounds like a reasonable piece of advice.”
So I invited a colleague of mine who’s the surgeon I worked with for thirty years. Her name is Celia Nelson. Celia is a Jamaican-born black female general surgeon, which is unusual—she’s definitely in the minority in the ACS. And she came on the call.
So it’s five of us on the call. Very, very civil conversation, well over an hour. We stated our position. 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.”
The Unexpected Ban
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. I thought, okay, this is 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 contacted Tyler Hughes. I 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 voice mailbox.” So it was a total isolation.
I said, “Why? Why am I being banned?” And the answer was because of your “continuous use of disrespectful language and persistent posting of nonclinical 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 “nonclinical material” was posting this issue of DEI on the clinical forums.
TUCKER CARLSON: That they brought up in the first place?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: That they—well, what’s interesting is this. They’re the ones saying that clinical outcomes in surgery are being impacted adversely for minorities.
TUCKER CARLSON: But, I mean, you were a—I mean, you spent over thirty years just being a surgeon cutting and healing people. Right? You’re not the one who brought this topic into the ACS in the first place. They did.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. But because you discussed a topic that they introduced, they said you weren’t a serious doctor and needed to be banned.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: 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 it several times. They’ve refused every single time.
Denied Due Process
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 that “We reviewed this, and we uphold the ban.” And this was 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. 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 allegation. If there is, they send it back to the board of regents who then 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. I mean, 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 on to your show very kindly.
Lowering Standards in Surgery
TUCKER CARLSON: I wanted to hear more about it not simply because you’re the victim of grotesque injustice and authoritarianism, but because the consequences of this kind of thinking are so dangerous to the public health that I think people need to know because everything you’re saying suggests that they’re going to radically lower the standard for surgeons.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Not that they are. They have. That’s—
TUCKER CARLSON: So how is that not a felony? How can you do that? 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, you know, critical job, the critical jobs in our society, and you lower the standards for that, that’s not a crime?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I think the way you do it is you do it really slowly over a long period of time, and no one really notices until it gets to that—
TUCKER CARLSON: Until people die.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Well, until—yeah. That’s an interesting thing you say that.
TUCKER CARLSON: You work with a knife in your hand.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, this is, like, the highest level of trust. You’re saying to somebody, “I’m going to let you cut me open.” Who would you say that to? Only a surgeon. And so the consequences are just beyond—if there was ever a field—you know, people talk about airline pilots.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Sure.
TUCKER CARLSON: If there was ever a field where excellence is a requirement of the field, it has to be medicine. And even beyond that, it has to be surgery.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: 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 in doing the best you can for your patient.
But, and I apologize, by the way, for putting you on the spot when we spoke. I think I may remember I asked you a question? I said, “What’s the most important thing you look for in a surgeon?” And you said “excellence,” which was exactly right.
But I wasn’t looking for excellence. I was looking for trust. You have to trust—trust 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.
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 go be doing those nice social things.
Continued Isolation
The other—so my ban remains in place. I’m still banned. The ACS will not engage with me.
TUCKER CARLSON: They have not engaged with you in three years?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Oh, no. Not at all. Not at all. They will refuse. I’ve written multiple letters. I wrote letters to the last two presidents. I never get an answer back.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I would just encourage anyone watching to Google these people and do not accept medical care from them. You don’t—I don’t want to be cut by an unreasonable ideologue.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Problem is you don’t know who those ideologues are.
TUCKER CARLSON: Let’s just start naming names. It would be nice to have their names. So you said not only do they plan to lower standards, but they already have.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Absolutely.
TUCKER CARLSON: Can you tell us what you mean?
Declining Surgical Standards
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: 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 thirty-eight years of surgery, I have gradually watched the quality of training in young surgeons deteriorate. You know, noticeably in my own little backyard, watching young surgeons come out that have no business operating by themselves.
TUCKER CARLSON: You’ve seen that?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I’ve seen that. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I can give you some examples.
I had a young surgeon—this is actually a few years back. I had a new surgeon in town at a hospital that I worked at, and I do breast reconstruction. So I worked a lot with the surgeons. Together, we’ll—you know, 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. 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. Go ahead. I’m fine. I don’t need the help.” And he left.
TUCKER CARLSON: Was this someone who’s out of medical school?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: This is a fully trained surgeon. Just newly 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 that he was not very competent, and he eventually moved on. I don’t know where he went or what he did.
TUCKER CARLSON: But it was obvious to you just from looking down the guy was not—
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: This guy had no clue how to close an abdomen. I mean, it was really bizarre. And that’s kind of an extreme example.
TUCKER CARLSON: How did he become a surgeon? That’s the thing.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Lowered standards, basically.
TUCKER CARLSON: Was this person from a protected racial group? Or—
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: No. No. He was not. He was your heteronormative white male like me, basically. But he was incompetent.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: 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 gotta wonder what he’s like.
And I’ve worked with other surgeons that were—I—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 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—
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
Axillary Node Dissection and Surgical Training
TUCKER CARLSON: 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. Yes. Basic operation. Even I know about it.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Every general surgeon learns that. Yes. And we were doing a case, and he was doing a biopsy in the armpit removing a single lymph node. And he commented, “You know, I’m really glad I don’t have to do an axillary node dissection because I’ve never done one before.” 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 step back a second to when you asked about quality and how it’s gone down. I don’t think it’s 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.
The Reduction in Residency Hours
One was in 2003, the American Graduate Medical Education. They came out and they took a law that was basically confined to New York from 1964 and made it nationwide. And that law was a reduction in residency hours. In other words, you can’t take a trainee in any medical specialty and make them work more than eighty hours a week or more than twenty-four hours at a stretch. And so that reduced residency hours dramatically because when I trained, it was not uncommon to work a ninety to a hundred and ten hour week.
That was pretty typical. And be on call, you know, thirty-six hours straight. I once worked forty-eight hours straight. Not that that’s a great thing, but, you know, you do what you have to do, and you learn. You learn to operate under circumstances when you’re tired and things like that.
And the idea was to reduce medical errors and things like that, which has been disproven that studies have shown that that reduction in hours did nothing to improve medical errors. But that was one thing that cut back the hours for training in surgery.
You know, you have a very limited motive there. The idea behind it, the reason that it occurred was because of a death. A young woman died in New York because of a medical drug error, a very rare drug reaction, and her father happened to be a very prominent attorney.
And he decided that the reason was that these residents were working too hard. They were too tired, and we needed to change that. And there was this spate of New York Times stories about this.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I remember this.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yeah. And that was only confined in New York until 2003, then it became a nationwide thing. General surgery is a five year residency program. In the first two years, you learn patient care.
You learn how to take care of patients before and after. You assist in operations. You do diagnostic differential diagnosis, and you learn how to work up a problem. And if you’re good, if you’re a good intern, if you’re a good first year, second year resident, you know, they throw you a bone. They’ll let you do a hernia, and they’ll let you do an appendectomy, and they hold your hand while you do it.
And then in the third and fourth years, you start to operate more, but you’re always operating under the direct supervision of a senior resident or an attending – the fully trained surgeon. And, again, you’re having your hands held. I mean, they have to let you work. They gotta put the knife in your hand, but they have to be good enough to do that and keep you out of trouble. And if you get in trouble, to get you out of trouble.
And so you spend those three to four years kind of honing your skills. And then in the fifth year, when you are what we call a chief resident, you’re basically regarded as being a surgeon, and you do your cases, you assist the younger surgeons on their cases, and the only time you call an attending surgeon in is if you’re doing something very major, very complex and/or if you haven’t done this before. And so at the end of that fifth year, you should be able to walk out of the hospital and go anywhere and operate as a general surgeon and function fully independently.
The Fellowship Problem
A study done in 2014 in the Annals of Surgery reported that eighty percent of the graduating general surgeons were not going into practice. They were going on to do a fellowship.
TUCKER CARLSON: Eighty percent?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Eighty percent. Fellowships in whatever, thoracic surgery, vascular surgery, colorectal, you name it. And that was in 2014.
They surveyed program directors. These are the chiefs, the heads of surgical programs to find out what these residents that they were getting, what these surgeons that they were getting in fellowships were like. They found out that sixty-six percent of them could not be relied upon to operate independently for more than about thirty minutes. That something like thirty percent or so could not handle tissues in a manner that was appropriate, atraumatically, if you will. Twenty, thirty percent couldn’t sew properly.
Close to the same number couldn’t identify the early signs of a complication. Some could not identify an anatomical tissue plane. These are people that are graduates of general surgery residencies coming out of these programs and going to fellowships. The saddest thing is that when they survey the young surgeons themselves and say, “Well, why are you going into this fellowship instead of going out and practicing?” More than half say it’s because they did not feel comfortable operating independently after five years of training.
So there’s something very wrong with the training they’re getting. They’re not getting enough cases to do. They’re not being allowed to operate. In some places, the attending surgeons are very hesitant to hand over a case to a younger surgeon because, number one, they’re responsible for that case.
Number two, you’re never going to be as efficient or fast as a young surgeon as you will later on when you’ve had more experience. So it takes longer, and it impacts your day, your schedule. It’s sad because they recognize this. I mean, these generations recognize this.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, it sounds like a total failure to train the next generation of surgeons.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: It’s a system failure. And the ACS recognizes this. And you know how I know that? It’s because since 2014, they’ve initiated what they call a mentorship program. And what they do is they try to find experienced surgeons that will mentor these young surgeons to help them come up to speed. So a young surgeon out of training that should be able to work on their own and finds that they’re struggling or not really able to do that, they would have an experienced surgeon to – I don’t want to say hold their hand, but to oversee them, supervise them.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: You know, scrub with them. They can’t find enough surgeons to do that for one thing. Here, the DEI really comes in too is they have this idea of racial concordance that what they need to do is find if it’s a black surgeon, they gotta find a black mentor for him. And if it’s a Hispanic surgeon, they gotta find a Hispanic mentor. And there’s not enough of those to go around.
The Surgeon Shortage Crisis
TUCKER CARLSON: So in addition to what are demonstrable, provable failures of medical schools to train the next generation of surgeons, and can I just say parenthetically, I feel like if they’re not training surgeons adequately – you know, surgeons are a small percentage of all physicians, probably the most important, but they’re probably not, and probably the smartest and most driven, then they’re probably failing?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I’ll agree with you on that. Yeah. They’re surgeons. It’s the most straightforward kind of medicine.
TUCKER CARLSON: So but in addition to that, they overlay these racial mandates. They decide that racism is the real problem, not incompetence, 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. So what happens?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Everything’s charged to go downhill really quickly.
I have people contact me just because my profile has been elevated by being out there a little bit. 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. And she was concerned because she wanted to get the most out of her training, and so she reached out to me to find out what things she could do. She told me things that are unbelievable. I mean, I’d never imagined these.
And this has been confirmed, not just my conversation with her. I’ve confirmed it from other sources as well. A couple of things. One is she talked about the difficulty getting enough cases under your belt. 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.
This, I could not believe. One of 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, a log of the cases you have done in the course of your residency program. So they list, you know, every case you’ve done.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Done as a surgeon, as an assistant and whatnot. Well, they’re now permitted to list operations in there as part of the surgical experience that they’ve only watched. So if they sit behind the anesthesia screen or look over the shoulder of the surgeon and watch an operation, they can list that in the logbook as part of their surgical experience. And I can tell you personally that you don’t learn surgery that way. You learn it by getting your hands in there.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve watched a lot of medical shows. I’m not a doctor. As a result.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: And that’s what’s scary, and that allows them to qualify for taking their boards.
TUCKER CARLSON: What would be, again, the motive there? Why would you allow that?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Well, the ACS has already anticipated there’s going to be a shortage of nineteen thousand surgeons by 2030. Five years from now, we’re going to be short nearly twenty thousand surgeons in this country.
Right now, the USA is short twelve hundred trauma surgeons. There are places that need a trauma surgeon that can’t get one because they’re just not around. 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. Gosh. There’s so much to this, Tucker, that goes into this.
Medical School Standards and DEI
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, back to the – I mean, all of this begins at the front end of the pipeline, which is medical school.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: So the standards for admission to medical school have been dropped dramatically for race reasons.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yep. Yeah. They’ve taken the medical license examination, the three part medical license examination, taking it from a graded exam to a pass fail. And to pass it, you only have to be above the bottom five percent in grade. If you are above the bottom five percent, you are going to pass the medical licensure examinations.
And in spite of that, which is an abysmal standard when you think about it, in spite of that, something like ten percent or more students at UCLA, ten percent or more students flunk one or more of the exams, and a number of them flunk these exams two and three times.
And yet they’re still being put through medical school. They don’t want to drop you. Again, back to the DEI for a second. If you’re an attending in a surgical training program and you have a surgeon that is inadequate, he’s just not cutting it.
And I saw this. I had in while I was in training, there were surgeons or people that came into the program that were dropped after year two because it was clear that they weren’t going to be able to do it. They just didn’t have the dexterity. They didn’t have the whatever. Today, if you do that and it’s a minority or underrepresented in medicine minority surgeon, as an attending, if you hold them back or if you drop them, what’s going to happen is you’re going to get reported.
You’ll get reported to the DEI establishment in that program, and invariably, they’re going to side with the resident and not with the attending.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why do they have the moral high ground if they’re putting people’s lives at risk, which they are? I mean, I think that’s a crime, but how did they get to attack you for upholding objective standards of surgery? I just don’t get it. Like, are there no sane people left in American medicine?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Well, the thing is this.
Recognizing Declining Quality in Surgery
TUCKER CARLSON: How do you recognize the quality going down? How do you recognize bad surgery? And one way that you recognize that is by complications. So the question would be, are people dying? Are complications going up in surgery?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Right now, you can’t answer that question. And one big reason why you can’t answer the question is that, in my opinion, the vast majority of surgery done today is done as an outpatient. The people that are in the hospital and have an operation are not the majority. They’re the minority.
If you do outpatient surgery, you do the operation, the patient goes home that day or after an overnight stay. Most complications don’t arise immediately. Bleeding occurs in the first day or two after. Infections, three, four days. Pulmonary problems. 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.
When you do have complications, they occur after the patient’s out of the system, so to speak, out of the hospital system. So there’s no required reporting. It’s all self-reporting. You get a letter periodically from the hospital saying, “Can you please tell us how all of your patients did? Do you have any complications?”
It’s human nature. If a patient gets an infection, you treat them with antibiotics, and the patient ultimately did okay, you could argue not to report that as a complication, and you could rationalize that it’s okay.
Concerning Trends in Surgical Training
The other issue, and I got this directly from one of the examiners—I know someone who has been examining surgeons for fifteen years for their boards. When you go to take your board examinations, he’s one of the people that sits in the room and asks you questions. What he’s noticed is that a lot of these residents are coming in, he’s looking at their cases, and he’s thinking, “Oh my gosh, they’re taking way too long to do these operations.”
When you go for your boards, the cases that they look at are not cases you did in training. These are cases you’ve done since you’ve been out. When you finish your residency, you’re allowed to go out and practice. I practiced for two years before I became board certified because it took two years to get my board certification. At that point, I’m regarded as a board eligible surgeon, and I’m entitled to full privileges.
When I go to take my board examination, I present them with a log of everything I had done for the past year, and they select cases to examine you on. These are the cases that these examiners are looking at, and he’s saying, they’re taking way too long. An operation that normally takes three to four hours is taking seven to eight hours for this person to complete.
I’ve seen this locally in my own community where nurses who know the good surgeons from the bad surgeons say, “Doctor so-and-so, he’s so slow. He just takes forever to do this operation.”
And complications are directly tied to length of surgery. I mean, absolutely, positively correlated. The longer the surgery, the more potential complications.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
Healthcare System Response
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: And this is recognized, and it’s recognized in a very interesting way. The CMS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Exactly.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: They’ve come out, and they said we are not going to pay for anesthesia beyond a certain time. For example, a breast reduction, which for me is about a three and a half to four hour operation, they’ll pay for four hours of anesthesia. If that goes beyond that, they’re not paying for that additional time.
The idea is they recognize that people are taking too long to do these things. Anesthesia has nothing to do with the length of surgery. They’re just there to keep the patient asleep and stable and alive for you while you’re doing your operation, 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.
This goes back to what I said. A lot of surgeons are not getting enough surgical experience to be able to operate independently, and efficiently, competently. 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. I’ve never tried to be the fastest guy on the block.
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, and patients don’t know that.
Speaking Out Against Declining Standards
That’s the other reason why I’m here, Tucker. I want this to be a wake-up call to my fellow surgeons. 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.
I would love for there to be a groundswell of surgeons coming out saying, “Wait a minute. What’s going on in my profession?” That there isn’t really bothers me because it’s more than physical dexterity.
TUCKER CARLSON: You’re counting on as a patient reason. You want a fact-based logical physician or else you could die. And so anyone who accepts clearly illogical, unreasonable suppositions and doesn’t push back against them is basically involved in witchcraft. Right?
So if I could say to you something that is provably untrue—
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Mhmm.
TUCKER CARLSON: And just on its face stupid, which is, “A black female patient needs a black female doctor.” It’s like, what are you even saying? Show me the evidence. There is no evidence. It’s crazy on its face. It’s Nazi stuff.
If you go along with that, then you’ve disqualified yourself because you’re not a rational person. You’re a witchcraft practitioner. So that just freaks me out. You could say, “Well, good people are going along with this.” Well, no. They’re disqualified by the fact they are going along with it. That’s my—as a patient, someone who’s undergone two surgeries—is that a fair view, you think?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Absolutely. I mean, think about this. You’re an intelligent person. You have probably a wealth of experience because of what you do. You weren’t aware of racial concordance. Ask any guy in the street about that. They’re going to just look at you like you have two heads. What the heck is that?
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, is it true? And if it’s true, how is that true? Again, the rest of us trust science not because we trust the people who carry it out, but because the idea itself is inherently reasonable. Prove it or I don’t believe it. The burden of proof is on the practitioner, the scientist, the physician, the surgeon, and the whole system is based on that.
If you can’t prove it, then you can’t know it. I thought that that’s science, right?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Well, that’s what they call evidence-based medicine, which is—
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, right. Yeah.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: But that’s all medicine should be evidence-based medicine, and if it’s not evidence-based medicine, it’s not really medicine. It’s witchcraft.
The Impact on Minority Surgeons
TUCKER CARLSON: So it freaks me out that the average doctor, average surgeon would for a second go along with this.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Well, think about it from this standpoint too. Think about, for example, Celia Nelson, this female Jamaican black surgeon that—
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Was on the Zoom call with me. She’s worked as hard as anybody to get to where she is. She’s an excellent surgeon. She’s experienced racism. And she’ll tell you flat out. When she first arrived there, people would mistake her for someone else, ask her to get a cup of coffee in the surgeon’s lounge, those sorts of things.
She also noticed that sometimes when she’d walk into an examining room in the emergency room, the look she would get was, “Who is this? Is this someone good?” And she’s worked through all that. She just put her head down. She worked hard.
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, and she’s going to be in there to see them. She’s earned her place.
But think how unfair it is for the people coming up now, the minority surgeons that have to face this idea when they go into a room, that person may look at them and say, “Is this a DEI hire, or is this a person that really got here because of their excellence, because of their excellent academic performance in college and medical school, because of their excellent performance in their residency, because they met all the standards that everyone should have to meet, or am I getting someone who’s a little bit less because of this?”
TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s part of the character. You’re getting someone less overwhelmingly, and that’s obvious. It has nothing to do with race, by the way. It’s that preferences are always destructive of excellence.
If you tell me that you’re the CEO of a company that your family owns—
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Mhmm.
TUCKER CARLSON: And you got the job because you’re the first son, my first assumption is—
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: They lowered standards to make you CEO.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Mhmm.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, right? It’s just obvious. And so if I have a black female surgeon, my first assumption will be this person had to meet lower standards because the school or the certifying board was so anxious to say we have a black female surgeon. And, of course, it’s unfair to the individual, but then the whole system is unfair. So should you be shocked that it produces unfair results? No. I mean, it’s unfair.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: It is unfair. On the face of it and in practice and every other possible way. You know, what I think was so despicable about anti-racism was it said that you cannot be against racism. You have to be for this whole anti-racism shtick.
TUCKER CARLSON: So attacking whites.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yeah. So, if you claim to be not a racist, that’s a racist statement. I mean, talk about the—
TUCKER CARLSON: But why would anyone go—of course, I mean, it’s a Chinese finger trap.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: The harder you pull to get out, the more stuck you are, but why would any—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 the witchcraft-based societies of the rest of the world, how in the world could you sit and let this happen? Anybody, any surgeon.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Well, I’ll tell you why I did it. I was too busy. I was just—I had my head in the sand.
TUCKER CARLSON: Was too anomaly. You actually stood up like a band for standing up. I’m just saying, about all your colleagues?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: You know, I’m fortunate in the sense that I was able to get through a career, and I’m at the twilight of my—no. Actually, at the end of my career. I have nothing to lose, Tucker. I mean, they can’t hurt me.
So I got many private messages, which I can’t access any longer from surgeons, including minority surgeons that said—
TUCKER CARLSON: Sure.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: “We agree with you, but we can’t speak up because we’re going to get pushed back. We’re going to be called Uncle Toms or racist or whatever if we agree with the premise that you’re putting out there.” I don’t have much to lose.
The Moral Responsibility of Surgeons
TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s just hard to let people like that off the hook. If you work in some normal company, it’s one thing, but if you’re a surgeon, you understand that lowering standards results in the deaths of people. The stakes are just the highest in any part of our society. You have the highest stakes. So sure, it could hurt your career. Sure, it could make you unpopular. Sure, they might call you names, uncle Tom or whatever, but you balance that against the deaths of innocents, and you think, I have to say something, don’t you?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: That’s where I found myself.
TUCKER CARLSON: I can tell. And bless you. 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? I don’t want to say that. Well, I do.
I do. I think that if you give the power that surgeons have—the power to cut people open unsupervised, and someone dies, and you cure the surgeon. You’re like God in the operating room. You have that power. In exchange for that power, you have to hold yourself to the highest moral standards, don’t you?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I agree with that. You’ll get no argument from me.
TUCKER CARLSON: Who has more power than a surgeon? Nobody.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: In that immediate moment, nobody does.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s what I’m saying. I mean, actual power, not theoretical power. A surgeon has more power than the president. He can cut open a person if the person’s unconscious.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Mhmm.
TUCKER CARLSON: He has total control over his operating room. Correct me if I’m wrong in any of this.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Captain of the ship, basically. Unquestioned.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right? So and he has a life in his hands. Like, not theoretical. Actual beating heart person. And so that person has to be of just the highest moral caliber or else innocents die. I mean, that’s my view. Anything which works against that, you have to fight. I think you have to work against it.
The Changing Landscape of Medicine
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: It’s disconcerting to me. I have to say maybe I can use stronger terms, but I had a lot of private affirmation from colleagues from surgeons. 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. Some of them, a few agree with the whole situation, crazy as it may be, all the DEI and so forth. And most of them were kind of like me. They were just going along and too busy taking care of their patients to the best of their ability.
TUCKER CARLSON: I understand that.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I’ve been doing this for thirty-eight 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, oh my gosh. The landscape out there has really changed. This is not the field of medicine that I went into.
You’d like to think when you’ve devoted your life to a career or profession that you’re going to leave it a little better than than you got it. You know, 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.
And you want to think that you’ve done somewhat the same. Now 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 train me and feel like I could go off. Well, I’ve got a generation behind me now. I’ve got a daughter who’s a physician. I’ve got a son-in-law, her husband, who’s a physician, 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. And I can’t say that.
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.
TUCKER CARLSON: So not progress.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I take responsibility for that. I take my own, but at the same time, I think it’s what happened to me, 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. I mean, there’s nobody out there who’s safe, and that’s a pretty frightening proposition.
Loss of Trust in Medicine
TUCKER CARLSON: And for those of us watching who aren’t doctors, it eliminates all trust. Don’t trust doctors. I don’t want to go to the doctor. I don’t like doctors. I loathe them. I don’t trust a lot of doctors.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: You don’t?
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t. Why? COVID.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Me too. I haven’t been a doctor since COVID. 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.
And the other issue, I don’t want to open a can of worms here, but the gender affirming care. I mean, how in God’s name did we get to a point where you have my profession—as far as surgery is concerned is probably the one most closely involved in the whole process of—
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course. It is.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Gender affirming care because of the work we do. 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 realize woman. Surgery. I mean, that is when you talk about witchcraft and voodoo, that is witchcraft and voodoo, and all the scientific evidence is against it.
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you know anyone who participates in it?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: You know people per—
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: No. I don’t know people that are doing the gender affirming care in minors, and I want to be very clear. If an adult thinks—if an adult male man thinks he’s a woman and god bless them, I feel sorry for them.
TUCKER CARLSON: Me too.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Really have to. But they’re an adult with agency to make decisions for themselves. That’s one thing. Minors is a whole different thing.
TUCKER CARLSON: Have you met any plastic surgeons who’ve done surgeries on minors?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Not that I know of personally. No. I know some that are doing some of this, what they call, euphemistically “top surgery” where they take off a breast, but they’re doing this in women that are adults. They’re taking off their breasts to turn them into—you know, make them look more male-like. I don’t know anyone personally who’s done this on children so far.
Medical Ethics and Conscience
TUCKER CARLSON: With abortion. Even when I was a child, there were doctors who said, you know, I just don’t believe in it. I think it’s immoral. I’m not participating in it. Now it’s my impression that it’s pretty hard to be a doctor unless you commit abortion like you kind of have to as part of your training if you’re an OBGYN.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I don’t know that you can get through medical school without participating in an abortion, an elective abortion. I can’t speak of that because I think that there—I know from personally that that wasn’t the case.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m aware. It wasn’t all the case.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: No. I know that.
TUCKER CARLSON: But my sense is now in practice, if not officially, that is the case, and it’s extremely hard to be an OBGYN resident and not participate in that. 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. Like, could you see that happening?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Oh, I could definitely see it happening. I mean, it is happening. It is being done. Now is it—are people being forced to do it? I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. I think people that are doing it are bought into the whole thing, and they’re doing that because they’re bought into it.
TUCKER CARLSON: But that just seems to act against evidence, the scientific evidence as the scientist, physicians or scientists. It just seems like you shouldn’t be allowed to conduct science if you’ve shown that you don’t believe in it.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: As a resident in surgery, you don’t have a lot of power in the sense of being able to say, won’t do this or I will do that. You can’t pick and choose what you’re going to do.
When I was in training, we had an experimental clinical study going on to do bariatric weight reduction surgery.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: We were approaching these bypasses through the chest and not the abdomen.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: And the attendings in our program came to us. The residents said, “Listen. We understand this is experimental program. We’re not going to make you do this. We’ll let you decide for yourself if you want to do these cases.” There were three of us at my level, and two of us said no. I was one of those. And the third one said, sure. He’d do it.
TUCKER CARLSON: But you did not want to participate?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Did not want to do that. I didn’t think it was a good operation, a good idea. Long and short is that the study showed that, yeah, she could lose weight by doing this, but the weight came back. These patients gained weight again. And so it was pretty much abandoned. And we’re talking, you know, back in 1984 or thereabouts.
And, of course, I remember one young woman who died directly as a result of the operation, which wasn’t that big a group of patients, and they had one death in that group. So, you know, you’re not always allowed to make the decision about what you could do.
Now if you’re in a residency program and you’ve got surgeons that are doing gender affirming surgery and, again, in minors, and you don’t want to participate in that. I can’t speak to this. 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.”
Moral Courage in Medicine
TUCKER CARLSON: I do know that—are you familiar with the case of Eitan Haim?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I’ve interviewed him.
TUCKER CARLSON: Ah, okay. What a man he is.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: One of my heroes.
TUCKER CARLSON: He is. There’s someone who has true courage. I mean, my courage is the courage of someone that doesn’t have too much to lose. His is the courage of someone who has everything to lose. 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.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: He is religious.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. Well, that—
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I’ve become friends with him, and I’ve actually had what I call these divine moments, if you will, but I’ve made a couple of—just felt compelled to call him a couple of times.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: 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. And so, you know, I just happened to be the person that made that phone call. And so we become friends.
TUCKER CARLSON: Good for you.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: And he is definitely a religious person in the sense that—
TUCKER CARLSON: Could feel that on him. Right? And more than that, he’s a moral person. And he has a strong sense of the other.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: No. It’s you’re absolutely right. And of all the people I’ve interviewed, boy, it’s funny you mentioned him. I’ve thought about him many times since that interview.
TUCKER CARLSON: No. He’s still in the thick of it, and he’s still under indictment, and he’s still facing trial.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: He’s going to win.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, he’ll win, and I’d—
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Well, he’s going to win. My suspicion is it’s all going to be dropped because the accusations are so out there that they just can’t—
TUCKER CARLSON: Eitan Haim, E-I-T-A-N H-A-I-M. Eitan Haim. So for those following who want to Google him.
Can Medicine Be Fixed?
TUCKER CARLSON: So do you think that this can be fixed?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: It can be fixed. Yes. But you’re talking about a long—the pipeline for surgery is five plus years. So, you know, and then you got the four years before the medical school. So if you’re going to fix the problem, you gotta go back to the medical schools. Honestly, you may have to go back to universities where the people will be indoctrinated in all this social justice stuff where they feel that that’s more important than what they’re doing.
The young doctors think that writing historic wrongs is more important than taking care of the patient in front of them. And you can’t practice medicine that way. That’s just not medicine.
So it can be fixed. It’s going to be a generational problem. It’s going to take a long time. 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, 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, and I don’t know who I’m going to go to. I somewhat semi-seriously told friends and family. I said, don’t go to a surgeon or a doctor under forty because they’ve been indoctrinated. Some of these guys are still wearing masks for Pete’s sakes.
Masks and Medical Standards
TUCKER CARLSON: Masks? Oh, yeah. There’s some physicians that still mask patients and things like that. It’s just crazy. There’s crazy stuff out there, Tucker. So if you’re a doctor and you’re openly mentally ill like that, why doesn’t anybody say anything?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: It’s a great question. Why doesn’t anyone in the physician’s group or the hospital say something? Well, first off, there are too few doctors. There are so few that a lot of doctors are there because there’s just not enough of them.
Try to talk to your doctor recently and make an appointment, just a routine appointment, you’re talking months down the road. You need something more urgently? Good luck with that. You’ll probably end up going to an urgent care center where you’ll see a nurse practitioner or a PA or someone that’s got a fraction of the education and experience of a physician.
Solutions for Medicine
So it’s not a simple cure for all of this. One thing I wanted to do with this conversation is not just simply bad mouth my organization, the ACS, or bad mouth medicine and surgery because I’m devastated by what’s happened. I really want surgery to be elevated to where it should be, which is a very highly regarded profession that has dedicated itself to taking care of all comers regardless. We don’t judge 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.
My first solution, obviously, is get DEI out of medicine. Politics and ideology do not belong in medicine. The Soviets proved that. The idea that you can take care of a patient if your first priority is to judge them based on their color or ethnicity is counter to everything that Hippocratic medicine is all about.
The other is to reinstall standards of excellence. We have to quit lowering the bar. We’ve got to start elevating the bar again and requiring that doctors and prospective doctors meet minimum standards. You know, there have to be some minimums, but they have to be higher than the lower five percent for Pete’s sake.
Training the Next Generation
We have to free the doctors in training to do what they have to do. You can’t have restricted hours when you’ve got such limited time anyway. In the overall course of a person’s lifetime, three, four, five years in surgery is a drop in the bucket. To ask a surgeon to devote themselves to learning the craft and what they call the art and the science of surgery—you not only need the time, you need the person to apply themselves.
One thing I heard, which again is kind of disturbing, is that a lot of young surgeons are more concerned about comfort, work-life balance as it’s often called, as opposed to learning to be the best doctor they can be. They want to know how much time off they have. They’re very jealous of their time off. Five o’clock rolls around, they’re done. They check out and they move out.
One thing that they found in asking all the program directors about the surgeons coming into their fellowships was that a large proportion did not have ownership of their patients. Ownership means that you take that patient as your patient. That’s not just someone that you take care of for a twelve-hour shift, and then you turn them over to the next person. And then you may not ever see that patient again or not until two or three shifts later. So a lot of young doctors don’t have ownership for their patients. I’m hearing that from colleagues.
TUCKER CARLSON: So how do you treat a rental car? Do you ever change the oil in it?
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: No. I don’t rotate the tires. I don’t tune it up.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s exactly right. Yeah. Well, you certainly wrecked my day, doctor, but I appreciate you doing this, taking all the time to explain this. We still have a good medical system. It’s probably still, in many respects, the best in the world.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I have to believe that, but it’s in disarray, and it’s definitely in decline. And I believe that it’s going to take some effort, some will from people that are willing to make those difficult changes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, thank you for your bravery.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: I don’t consider myself brave, but I appreciate that thought.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, nobody else is. So I can’t thank you enough for giving me a platform on which to speak.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I had an emergency appendectomy once by Doctor Leon Pactor, who was an amazing surgeon, and it saved me. So I think most people have had an experience like that, and it’s important.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: This is an interesting little factoid.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Ibram Kendi, the author of anti-racism—
TUCKER CARLSON: Not a surgeon.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Not a surgeon. He’s an author of anti-racism.
TUCKER CARLSON: A moron.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Yep. He had colon cancer. And he reported that he interviewed several surgeons, black surgeons, but chose the white surgeon for his surgery.
TUCKER CARLSON: Shouldn’t be allowed.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Nope.
TUCKER CARLSON: You get the surgeon from Burkina Faso, Ibram Kendi. That’s my opinion. Thank you, doctor, but I’m obviously a vindictive bad person. So, anyway, thanks. I appreciate it.
DR. RICHARD BOSSHARDT: Appreciate the time.
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