HONOLULU – The Filipino community in Hawaii has lost one of its most prominent members with the recent death of Dr. Jorge G. Camara, famous eye surgeon and humanitarian whose extraordinary talents and path-breaking discoveries elicited international renown and numerous prestigious awards in his lifetime.
Camara was Class 1976 valedictorian at the University of the Philippines College of Medicine, duplicating the unusual feat of his father, Dr. Augusto Camara, who was summa cum laude of his class in an earlier time. The elder Camara’s academic record and grade point average at UP remain unsurpassed in the annals of medicine in the Philippines. His son Jorge, the eldest of 12 children, was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the United States.
After finishing his residency in ophthalmology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, Jorge Camara moved to Honolulu and worked with Straub Hospital for a while. Later he and his wife, Virginia (Binky) Valdes, also a UP College of Medicine graduate, opened the Camara Eye Clinic. He pioneered in discovering new surgical techniques, developing a new laser procedure to treat blocked tear ducts, for instance. He also discovered a unique condition found in his patients of Asian ancestry called “involutional lateral entropion.”
Camara was featured in CNN International News and on the NBC, CBS and ABC TV networks in America for having performed the first-known orbital surgery via long-distance telemedicine, restoring the sight of a 16-year-old female patient on the Big Island in Hawaii. It was an astounding accomplishment.
His groundbreaking work in his medical specialization and scores of scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals won for him numerous awards at the height of his career. He was named 2001 Physician of the Year by the Hawaii Medical Association. And from 2002 through 2012, he was consistently voted by his peers as one of the “best doctors” in Hawaii. Indeed, he was among the most famous medical professionals in Hawaii.
Camara was also an accomplished concert pianist who organized four “sold-out” musical concerts that earned $130,000 each, raising much of the operating funds for the Aloha Medical Mission (AMM), which he helped establish in the 1980s.
He would play the piano himself, performing classical pieces, in these concerts. The AMM, a nonprofit organization, has undertaken hundreds of medical missions to the Philippines and other countries in Asia, performing voluntary health services and operations in indigent or poorly served communities. Camara would be in most of these missions.
There seemed no end to Camara’s intellectual curiosity and creative energies, as well as his work ethic. Two more discoveries added to his increasing fame. One was his research on the effects of volcanic pollution, known as “Vog,” on the eyesight of his patients on the Big Island where the Kilauea volcano has been erupting since 1983. The other was his discovery of the healing power of music on patients about to undergo eye surgery. His theory was that music lowered the blood pressure and heart and respiratory rates of patients, and he himself would play the piano in the operating room. He was the first to produce a CD titled “Live from the Operating Room,” which included classical music from Chopin to Debussy.
Yet for all his fame and glory, Camara remained the ever-compassionate and humble “doctors’ doctor” and unpretentious humanitarian that marked him as a most compelling personality. He was one of the most gifted individuals one will ever meet, and his caring nature—he attended to his patients, as many as 60 to 80 on a typical day, regardless of whether they could pay or not—will be long remembered. His sense of service was just incredible.
More than 1,000 people flocked to his memorial service in Honolulu to honor him and pay their respects to this incomparable man of science and culture. I understand that there will be a similar service shortly in the Philippines, after the 40th day of his passage to eternity.
Jorge Camara will be greatly missed, but his profound legacy to humanity will live on.
Dr. Belinda A. Aquino, a longtime Honolulu resident, is professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she was professor of political science and Asian studies and founding director of the Center for Philippine Studies.