All I can say about that is

that all the studies that have been done trying to demonstrate that implicit bias is a factor, that it affects how we treat people as doctors, have been discredited.

In fact, the whole concept of implicit bias itself has been discredited.

It was based on something called the implicit association test.

And that was a test that was done where people were shown pictures of individuals of different races and ethnicities and so forth.

And they were made to respond, you know, by pushing a button.

And the way they judge these things was, you know, people would push buttons a little more slowly or the response that was in some way affected based on what they were looking at.

was the ACS pushing? What was this policy that they were presenting to you that you responded to? What did they want you to

Tyler Hughes?

Yeah. Yeah, general surgeon. And he was the editor-in-chief of the, of The Communities, so he was kind of moderating. And, and he would weigh in sometimes if it seemed like, you know, surgeons were getting a little bit too, too heated and so forth. And my position was, you know, s- we're professionals. We're, you know... Surgeons are opinionated. Uh, we're not shrinking violets. We, we state our, 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. Uh, and, um, so this went forward, and as comment threads do, it r- it kind of ran its, its life expectancy really beyond what you'd think four months. At which point I was thinking, "So, 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. Uh, Tyler Hughes reached out to me and said, "Uh, we'd like to have you on a Zoom call." Um, and this would- this was gonna happen in 2022. They wanted to wait a little bit, th- wasn't until March, because they were bringing on board their new director of diversity, um, a doctor named Bonnie Mason, who was their clinical director of diversity. And so, the Zoom call consisted of myself and Tyler Hughes and Bonnie Mason and a regent of the ACS, a member of the Board of Regents named Tim Eberlein, who is a very well-known prominent surgeon, uh, in a big institution. Uh, and I had joined a group called FAIR, uh, F-A-I-R, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, and I helped found, uh, FAIR in Medicine, which has been working kind of like Do No Harm in the area of, of DEI medicine. And so I went to some of my colleagues in FAIR and said, "Hey, listen, I'm invited to this Zoom call. Uh, how do you think I should prepare for this?" Uh, and the first thing they said is, "Don't go by yourself (laughs) 'cause you're gonna get jumped on." I said, "Okay, that sounds like a reasonable piece of advice." So I invited a colleague of mine, who's a surgeon I worked with for 30 years. Her name is Celia Nelson. Celia is a Jamaican-born black female general surgeon, which is an un- it's unusual. It's n- she's definitely in the minority in the ACS. Um, and she came on the call. So it's five of us on the call.... very, very civil conversation, well over an hour. We each stated our positions, I stated my concerns. She expressed the same concerns that I did from her standpoint as a woman, a Black woman surgeon, um, 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, uh, I sent an email to everyone that was on the, the Zoom call and said, "Thank you so much, I hope this will be the start of a conversation where we can discuss these things." And a few weeks later, I couldn't get on the communities anymore. I tried to get on the website and get on the communities and I couldn't get on. And I thought, "Okay, there's some glitch here," right? Thinking maybe it was on, on, the site had a problem. I waited and I waited, pretty close to a couple of weeks before I finally said, I contacted Tyler Hughes and said, "Tyler, um, what's going on? I can't get on the communities." And this is when I was told, "Oh, by the way, you are permanently banned from access to the communities and, in addition, you're banned from access to the member directory of the ACS, and you're banned from your own private voicemail box." So, it was a total, total isolation. And I said, "Why? Why am I being banned?" And the answer was, "Because of your continuous..." and I'm, uh, basically quoting, "Your continuous use of disrespectful language and persistent posting of non-clinical material on clinical forums." So, the point, the thing was I was being disrespectful, which I have disputed, um, and I can prove I wasn't, um, and my non-clinical material was posting this issue of DEI on the clinical forums.

The Soviets proved that.

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 or ethnicity is, is counter to everything that, uh, Hippocratic Medicine is all about. Uh, the other is to reinstall standards of excellence. We have to w- we have to quit lowering the bar. We gotta start elevating the bar again and requiring that, you know, doctors and prospective, uh, uh, doctors meet, you know, minimum standards. You know, there have to be some minimum, but they have to be higher than the lower 5%, for Pete's sakes. They can't be that. We have to free, you know, 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, in the overall, you know, uh, course of a person's lifetime, you know, three, four, five years in surgery is a, is a drop in the bucket. I mean, to, to ask a surgeon to devote themselves to learning the craft and, 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. One thing I heard, which again, is, uh, 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. They wanna know how much time off they have. They want... They, they're very jealous of their time off, you know? 5:00 rolls around, they're done. They check out and they move out. 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. And ownership means that, you know, you take that patient as your patient. 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, and then, you know, you may not ever see that patient again or not until, you know, two or three shifts later, you know? So, a lot of young doctors don't have ownership for their patient, and I'm, I'm hearing that from, from colleagues.