Ting is a surgeon, who studied in Ateneo all his life before he got to the University of the Philippines College of Medicine and trained in the Department of Surgery at the Philippine General Hospital. He subsequently obtained a scholarship to train in neurosurgery at the Allgemeines Krankehaus der Stadt Wien in Austria where he learned to speak German for self-defense. This was on top of having to study Latin for six years and Spanish for four years in Ateneo. But he still dreams in Bol-anon, being the offspring of Boholano parents who migrated after the Second World War to Mindanao—where Ting was born and raised. He insists on living in Davao and happily swears that he would not mind dying in and for Mindanao as he would do just as gleefully for the country. Exasperated of the perceived gap “between the preaching of medicine in the college and the practice of it” in the hospital like the proper garbage disposal was taught while rotten placentas were thrown under the water tower in the hospital, he organized a series of dialogues between the Dean of the college and the PGH Director to address exactly these issues.
He then led a hospital strike in PGH, the first ever in the world that made Congress finally gave in and passed a bill handing over the PGH budget to UP. Of the experience, Brod Ting writes, “We called off the strike and melted back into the work staff, happy that things were going to be better and hoping that this would be a template for collective action on matters that were previously thought to be hopeless and beyond the efforts of ordinary people who passed through the corridors of PGH in their own time in history.” During the last year of his surgical residency training, he took another cause to provide some incentive for trainees who wanted to stay in the country. As he relates, the Martial Law era was a time when majority of PGH trainees left the politically unstable Philippines for abroad He decided not only to stay in the country but also to go back to his native Mindanao where his decision was in part due to his desire to address what was desperately needed in his hometown. “You cannot treat stab wounds with aspirin; or you cannot treat gunshot wounds in nine year old kids with kidneys hanging out blown off by M14 bullets, with cough syrup. I knew where I was going.”
He has been serving the people of Davao for more than thirty years. In 1979, he pursued further training in Neurosurgery at the University of Vienna; only to return to head the Department of Surgery at the Davao Medical Center. In 1990, he along with others set up the first cooperative hospitals in Davao City and Tagum, Davao Province. In his efforts, he aims to not only cure the sick poor but also the sick health system in place in the country. Thus, he argues that health care delivery must be intrinsically related to communities. Hospitals must not be built like “bazaars and malls where people get what they can afford; institutions must be ran and patronized by communities according to their need.” It is in this light that his cooperative hospitals were conceptualized. Today, over fifty such hospitals have been established all over the country. In 2007, he was conferred the Ozanam Award by the Ateneo de Manila University and the Dr. Jess and Trining dela Paz Award for his advocacies by the Ateneo de Davao University. Brod Ting also writes a regular column for Mindanews. He has written two books, “Child of the Sun Returning” and “Surgeon Do Not Cry.” In the latter, Brod Ting, still the renegade, is nonchalant in his criticism of the institutions of UP and PGH. Throughout his life, Brod Ting dissented when the need arose, moved in the face of apathy, paved the way for the realization of many of his strong-held convictions and as he puts it, “raised hell” all along the way.
