Camara named physician of the year
By Alice Keesing
Advertiser Health Writer
The days sometimes don't seem long enough to ophthalmologist Dr. Jorge Camara as he packs in his surgeries, his research and teaching, and his volunteer work that helps the poor in Hawai'i and around the world.
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser
His 16-hour plus days have amounted to an outstanding career, which earned Camara the kudos of his colleagues recently as the Hawai'i Medical Association named him the 2001 physician of the year.
Ophthalmologist Jorge Camara, right, was recently named Physician of the Year by the Hawai'i Medical Association.
"He's a doctors' doctor, a researcher, a teacher and a humanitarian — he's a great guy," said doctor David Randell, president of the Hawai'i Ophthalmological Society, who joined with Dr. Anthony Martyak in nominating Camara for the award.
Camara made national news when he became the first doctor to use the new area of telemedicine to guide another doctor in a surgical procedure. From O'ahu, Camara guided a Big Island physician as she removed a tumor from the eye of a local teen, restoring her sight.
He has developed a diagnostic test for blocked tear ducts and pioneered laser surgery for the condition. His list of publications and scholarships are longer than both his arms. He trains fledgling ophthalmologist from the Philippines. He heads the ophthalmology division at St. Francis Medical Center. And he is an associate professor at the University of Hawai'i.
The many peaks in Camara's career are recorded on the walls of his office in the carefully framed awards, newspaper articles and poems from patients. Prominent in the doorway is a large award from the president of the Philippines for his work helping his home country.
The resume is impressive; the man himself is soft spoken and down to earth.
"I love what I do," Camara said yesterday after performing six operations and seeing 35 patients.
In an impassioned career, his biggest passion is the Aloha Medical Mission, which dispatches medical teams to give free treatment and surgery to needy patients in Third World countries such as the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, China and Bangladesh.
Hawai'i medical staff volunteer their time and pay their own way to go on the missions, which in the last 18 years have helped about 20,000 patients. For many of the patients, the mission is their only hope of receiving the health care they could not otherwise afford. Camara is vice president of the mission, helping to plan each trip as well as treating patients.
"You meet truly needy people," Camara said. "To see the joy in their faces when they can't see the day before and you take off the patch and they say, 'I can see.' "
Camara describes the heartbreak of the patients the mission helps: the children with huge tumors, others with disfiguring cleft palates; the lines that stretch out the door even after five days of non-stop treatments and surgeries.
"Once you go on a mission and you see these people, you almost won't be able to not go back," he said.
Mission President Dr. Ramon Sy has watched Camara work hours of overtime to help as many patients as he can before the mission team packs up and heads back to Hawai'i.
"He is a very dedicated and compassionate person who will do the most he can to help these people," Sy said.
Camara also has turned his attention to those who fall through the cracks in Hawai'i, volunteering his time to help the elderly who don't have medical insurance and new immigrants.
"They have no job, and we help them until they can enter into the world of proper medical care," Camara said. "Some of them have something as mundane as a cold; others can't see because they don't have glasses; some of them have serious medical problems."
Given Camara's medical lineage, he said it's not really surprising he became a doctor. His father is a doctor. So is his aunt. He is one of 12 children, among whom there are four doctors, an orthodontist and a chiropractor. His wife is a doctor, too. And his son recently graduated in pre-medicine.
"My father would come home and say, 'Jorge, you've got to be a doctor, it's the most wonderful profession in the world; you can help people and make them happy.'"
Camara nearly became a lawyer, but changed track halfway through his training.
"I may have made a good lawyer," he said, laughing, "but I love being a doctor."
