Behind the Night, the Surgery Podcast, relevant and engaging content designed to help you dominate the day.

Welcome to Behind the Night, the Surgery Podcast. I'm Jason Bingham. I'm your host and I'm joined with Behind the Night team members, Nina Clark and Shinas Hussein.

Today we are thrilled to have Dr. Henry Buckwald. He's a professor, amateur of surgery in biochemical engineering at the University of Minnesota.

He is a veteran. He's a world-renowned surgeon, author, professor and patient health care advocate. He is a pioneer in the field of bariatric and metabolic surgery, recipient of numerous NIH grants with over 360 peer-reviewed publications as contributed to over 100 books.

He has served at the president of over five surgical professional organizations and is the winner of numerous awards as an educator, researcher and clinician.

He's also a high-volume clinician with over 10,000 surgeries under his belt. His recent book, Healthcare Upside Down, a critical examination of policy and practice, was born out of Dr. Buckwald's observations of the healthcare industry over the last 50 years.

In it, he explores how healthcare has been turned upside down to serve the administrators of the system in a way from its basic function of offering the best care for patients.

More importantly, he discusses solutions for turning our broken healthcare system right side up to better serve all patients.

Dr. Buckwald, thank you for joining us today on Behind the Knife.

It's my great pleasure. Let's do it. Let's have a show and let's try to tell people about the book.

Okay. Well, great book very timely. I think it highlights a lot of what us who work as healthcare workers as well as patients are feeling about our healthcare system.

So let's just jump right into it. So in the book, you talk, you know, that despite the USA's prominent role in medical advancements, you highlight some of the ways that the United States is far behind in terms of various healthcare parameters.

Could you start by discussing some of these parameters that you highlighted in the book just to give us just to kind of framed issue and give us a scope of what the problem is.

First of all, let me correct you, Jason. You're not a doctor anymore. You're a provider.

And we don't treat patients anymore. We treat clients and we work for a firm in, you know, that book 1984 by Orwell that actually was published in 1942 or 43 showed that language precedes reality.

And this has happened in our profession. We have become providers to our clients working for a firm dominated by an administocracy.

And I didn't want this book to be just opinion or personal anecdotes, which it is a lot of the stories in it.

I wanted to start with the facts. So there are some world recognized statistical criteria of how good a nation is doing in healthcare.

And so in this book, I picked the major ones that are listed as the major criteria by the World Health Organization.

And I'm opening those books so I get to the numbers. And of course, the first one is life expectancy.

And we are 46.

Above us is Hong Kong at number one Canada 16, Germany 27, United Kingdom 20, essentially every European Western nation, New Zealand, Australia and our neighbor can have a better life expectancy. And we are 46.

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