I WAS A GEOLOGIST working in the Sierra Madre when the Dumagat people took me to their primitive jungle village to see a sick man. I couldn’t change the fate of that man but he changed mine.”
Dr. Jose Antonio Socrates, arguably one of the country’s best orthopedic surgeons apart from being a licensed geologist, was a guest in a Palawan radio program early this week, talking about his current work with the disabled and narrating the story of how he had established his medical practice as a rural doctor after a long stint of training in America and Europe over a decade ago.
The radio host blared during the show that he had so far counted over 400 text messages sent by listeners all over the province, mostly from those whose lives he had touched.
“One particular caller was suggesting that Doc Soc should be nominated for sainthood,” Gerry Ortega, the host of RMN Palawan radio, amusedly said.
While many Filipino specialized surgeons struggle to establish a financially rewarding medical practice abroad, Doc Soc, as he is called hereabouts, shunned practice in the United States and Europe to pursue a lifelong dream to do so in rural Palawan.
Socrates was a licensed geologist when he decided to take up medicine at the University of the Philippines. During the martial law years, he was forced by the political turmoil to leave the country and seek further medical studies in the United States and Europe.
“I was a DOG (doctor of medicine and geology) after I graduated from UP. But my wife and I had to flee the Marcos dictatorship and I became an ASO (aspirant of surgery overseas),” he said.
His predilection with acronyms was splattered in the places where he held offices. When he was designated health officer for Palawan several years ago, the sign on his office door merely stated “SeKuEd.” One had to ask an insider to find out that it meant “Sentro ng Kulang sa Edukasyon.”
Wanting of education, he is but last in the list if there is even one.
In the 15 years he was overseas, Doc Soc chalked up an impressive resumé—the only Filipino fellow of Royal College of Surgeons and British Orthopedic Association; a graduate of University of Kentucky Medical Center general surgical residency program; a Mashav scholar in plastic surgery in Israel; a specialist in neurotrauma from Cambridge University and in orthopedics at Suffolk’s Ipswich Hospital in England.
His most sterling accomplishment to date is his being a recipient of the prestigious Sasakawa Health Prize in 2007, which was conferred by World Health Organization, for outstanding work in the field of rural medicine. The prize is given once a year to an individual or institution chosen from a thousand nominees from all over the world.
Doc Soc operates on a mind-set some people may call crazy. Not only that he hates wearing leather shoes and struts around in flip-flops during formal functions. He never charges patients, including the rich, for his services. Often, the orthopedic center that he created, Bahatala (Bahay Hawak Tayo Lakad) would even extend financial services to needy patients.
While in the United States and without his knowledge, his relatives there had succeeded in securing his US residency status, “but I was so mad that I had it immediately revoked.”
“My life abroad was always geared toward coming home and I knew that here in Palawan I will have patients who cannot pay me. I cannot sustain myself by making a living out of medical practice,” he told the Inquirer.
Fundraising
To sustain his medical practice without having to charge patients, he birthed an idea to create “my own funding agency.”
Embarking on a hit-and-miss approach of asking money from friends and charitable institutions, he said that, at one point, he had written 80,000 letters of solicitation. With patience and perseverance, he had hit pay dirt and raised just enough to establish a foundation, British Palawan Trust.
Bahatala, now a 10-bed orthopedic unit adjacent to Palawan Provincial Hospital, is a busy hub open to all, mostly poor patients.
“The British Palawan Trust allowed me to practice in the classical medical way without having to think how much to charge my patients,” he said.
A plateful of concerns
On the side, Doc Soc is consumed by a cornucopia of nonmedical concerns and advocacies, churning out unsolicited opinion and policy papers on a wide range of issues and distributing them personally to government offices and friends.
He is a front-liner in a citizens’ watchdog organization queerly named Kilusang Love Malampaya (you guessed right, he coined it) to monitor perceived abuses by politicians on the use of royalty shares of Palawan from the Malampaya natural gas project, offshore north of the province.
At present, he is embroiled in a spat with the administration of the provincial hospital over the destruction of centuries-old acacia trees to pave the way for a building.
At one time, he launched a public crusade against a big hotel in Puerto Princesa City for its refusal to admit him because he wore slippers instead of shoes during a public function.
Doc Soc describes himself as “a one-peso consultant,” which meant he was not paid any professional fee when his services as a geologist was tapped by the provincial government to argue its case in Congress and in Malacañang about a territorial dispute between the national government over the Malampaya gas reserves.
Palawan Bishop Pedro Arigo describes Doc Soc as “an embodiment of someone who had really dedicated himself to the poor and the needy.”
In the context of Doc Soc’s lifestyle and work ethic, in which going to Sunday Mass is nowhere in his schedule or routine, it was almost strange to find him having an influential Catholic bishop for a friend and ally. “I know he doesn’t attend the Holy Mass and I wish he does but he lives his life as a true Christian, especially with his work among the poor,” Arigo said.
With British Palawan Trust gaining more donors, Doc Soc has embarked on an ambitious plan to expand his services to providing hospital and nonhospital-based free orthopedic services.
Central to this is his engagement with the disabled sector through a program which he recently coined “Paa ng Palawan,” which stands for Prosthesis for Ambulating Again.
“I am getting old and one day I will be just another DOG (dead old geologist),” he quipped.
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