Surgeon says ‘toxic’ DEI in medicine has led to ‘erosion’ of quality care: ‘Dangerous to our patients’, by Kristine Parks, Fox News, December 27, 2023
A surgeon blasted a top medical organization for doubling down on its antiracist initiatives at a time when many corporations and organizations are distancing themselves from these controversial principles.
“America’s surgeons are not woke enough, according to the American College of Surgeons (ACS),” Dr. Richard Bosshardt [right] penned in his column for National Review this week.
The largest surgical organization in the country recently launched a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion toolkit for providers. In an announcement earlier this month, the ACS touted the materials would “provide a blueprint for implementing equitable practices” in medicine.
Bosshardt explained how the ACS has rapidly embraced DEI and antiracist teachings since 2020. He argued that the organization was sacrificing quality medical training and patient care by focusing on concepts like “microaggressions,” “implicit bias” and “White privilege” that he says “have no place in medicine.”
The tool kit is an exhaustive, some might say exhausting, compilation of everything related to pushing the narrative of systemic and structural racism as the source of disparities including minority representation within the ACS and clinical outcomes in minority surgical patients,” he explained.
The surgeon said the toolkit uses flawed studies to promote the “unbelievably toxic” idea that racism infiltrates surgery and leads to poorer outcomes for Black patients. The toolkit also pushes implicit racial bias training to combat racism, despite research debunking its validity, he said.
Bosshardt claimed the worst part of the toolkit was that it requires surgeons to lump patients into racial identity groups, which he believes threatens the traditions modern medicine is based on.
“The traditional tenets of Hippocratic medicine, which focus on the individual in front of the physician, have been, for all intents and purposes, abandoned. Any disparity in outcomes of care of minorities is proof of racial discrimination,” he wrote.
This focus on anti-racism and DEI will have a detrimental effect on medicine, Bosshardt argued, by threatening precious time for training surgeons and thus endangering patients.
“There is a finite amount of time in residency training to mold a competent surgeon from a fumble-fingered intern. To assume that we can continue to turn out excellent surgeons and simultaneously burden surgical education with the degree of time-consuming indoctrination in anti-racism and DEI demanded by the ACS tool kit is, at best, foolish and futile, and, at worst, dangerous to our patients,” he wrote.
The surgeon said he had already begun to see the “erosion” of quality medical care from these policies.
“I have spoken to many of my surgical peers, and we agree that we are already seeing an erosion of quality in surgery, with many programs turning out surgeons who are not ready to practice independently. I have spoken to surgical residents who report a sense that they are not getting the necessary hands-on clinical and surgical experience to feel confident, while being simultaneously tasked with assimilating and regurgitating anti-racist and DEI ideology,” he concluded.
Many corporations have modified their DEI policies in 2023 under threat from conservative legal groups, FOX Business reported.
Leading DEI executives from entertainment giants like Disney and Netflix have also left their posts in 2023.
The University of North Carolina’s medical school abandoned its DEI task force in June, ahead of the Supreme Court’s ruling rejecting affirmative action policies in college admissions.