From Darkness To Light: A Journey Of Global Vision Restoration

16 Jun , 2025 podcasts

 

Being blind in itself is already a challenging impediment – how much more if you are a visually impaired person living in a low-resource community? Ophthalmologist Dr. Hunter Cherwek is on a journey of global vision restoration, eliminating avoidable blindness in underserved areas around the world. Joining Katherine Twells, this visionary leader shares how he changes lives through cutting-edge telemedicine and modern technological innovations through their non-profit organization, Orbis International. Dr. Hunter also highlights the power of creating genuine connections and building communities to make the world a better place – one restored eyesight at a time.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

From Darkness To Light: A Journey Of Global Vision Restoration

The Story Of Dr. Hunter Cherwek And The Orbis Flying Eye Hospital

Greetings, friends, and welcome to the show. It’s so easy to take things for granted in our lives, and certainly it would be easy to take our vision for granted, the very thing that allows us to see the wonder surrounding us. Now imagine not being able to see the beauty of the natural world, a sunrise or a sunset, or the faces of those we love. Every day, in many lower-resource communities, millions suffer from blindness that could be prevented. My guest on the show is a visionary leader, pun intended, committed to change all that. His mission is to eliminate avoidable blindness in low-resource communities around the globe. This is the passionate work of Dr. Hunter Cherwek and the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital.

Dr. Cherwek is vice president, clinical services and technologies at Orbis. He began his journey with a degree in biology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a medical degree from Duke University. After his residency in ophthalmology at Emory University, he joined Orbis, where he was able to lecture and work in over twenty countries aboard the Flying Eye Hospital.

To help build the organization’s award-winning telemedicine platform called Cybersight. After working with Orbis, he was actually based in Beijing, China, for over six years, working with Alcon as the medical director of strategic markets to help improve surgical training efforts and access to quality cataract care in both Asia and Russia. He then returned to Orbis to continue to support its clinical training efforts and patient care programs.

How does this conversation connect to you? Hunter is an example of how using our gifts in inspiring ways can change everything. As he tells his story, can you imagine the ripple effect that you can create in your own life through actions, both small and large? In our conversation, you’ll hear how this work has changed his life and how we can all find ways to serve the greatest of good, no matter where we are and what our chosen occupation is. Please enjoy the conversation with the very passionate Dr. Hunter Cherwek.

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Hunter, first of all, it is lovely to see you again. I know we had a chance to meet. Thank you so much for taking the time to connect.

No, thank you for this. It’s exciting to sit and talk to each other and celebrate Memorial Day weekend. I’m glad we’re doing this now.

Global Ophthalmologist Dr. Hunter Cherwek

It’s a great way to kick off a beautiful three-day weekend. I have to say that this show, our guests go into a couple of different areas. We talk about compassion. We talk about strength and resilience in people, and we talk about conscious leadership. For me, you hit on all three of those points because the work that you’re doing in the world is all about compassion. You’re certainly building strength and resilience, and you are a very special leader in what you do. I’m excited to share your story with our readers. Let’s just dive into who you are, Hunter? What is your background? What is your origin story? In origin stories are long, but how would you summarize your journey that puts you in the place that you are today?

I grew up in a small town, Virginia. As you can imagine, with the name Hunter, I grew up in an outdoors family. I love fishing. I no longer hunt. I had been in medicine and had seen medicine because my father was a physician, and he was a cardiologist, and my grandfather, his father, spent most of his life legally blind. For most of my life, I don’t think my grandfather ever really saw me. I was a science nerd. I went to college thinking I was going to do something in the sciences.

I wasn’t sure what that would be. Graduated from college at UNC early and was a ski bum. I thought I’d maybe do that for a while, but obviously that’s only a short career. I went to Duke for med school and was lucky enough to finish that early, with some research, and was a fly fishing guide. I’ve worked for Orbis and Orbis. When I was in college, I had the chance to go to Kenya on a scholarship, and I thought I was going to be an orthopedic surgeon. I was an athlete.

I loved hand surgery, but as soon as I saw the transformation of eye surgery and that you could almost do it anywhere, I was hooked. I was one of the few people that went to med school knowing I was going to do global health. As I got more and more into med school, I did research in ophthalmology. I saw all these amazing things.

I was lucky enough to go to Emory in downtown Atlanta, got amazing training, and had great classmates. I turned in my pager at 5:00 PM when that was a thing. I flew out that night to join the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital in Western China. I’ve been doing global work for about twenty years. I can say I’m living the dream I never dreamed of.

The best part of my job is obviously that I get to help those who need it most, but selfishly, I’m surrounded by some of the most talented and smart people I could imagine, whether those are pilots or doctors, or people working in development. For me, this has been a dream path and Orbis, both the plane literally, but the organization has been an incredible journey and vehicle for that.

Hunter, I think about so many things on your path that shaped you. I love how you stitched together a bunch of things, not only time to fly fish and be a ski bomb and figure out what you wanted to do in your life, but then back into this incredible, intense journey. I have to feel like your grandfather’s situation was always playing in the background for you, that led you into working with blindness. Do you feel like that’s true? I know you start off in the hand space.

Yeah, you’re exactly right. I was scared of my grandfather growing up because he wore an eye patch over one eye, which was completely blind. My dad, who thought cardiology was the end-all be-all. He wanted me to be a cardiologist. He got me the best stethoscope you could imagine when I went to med school. I quickly returned it on my first day of ophthalmology.

You have to wake up every day and have someone above you that you care about. Otherwise, life becomes vacuous pretty quickly. Share on X

He also had retinal problems. He had a retinal detachment. He was deathly afraid of going blind. I think on a personal front, I’ve always been around and aware of the importance of vision. Professionally, it was not something I was considering. I loved hand surgery, microsurgery, and all that.

When I saw what ophthalmology is doing, and I will tell you, I truly believe we’re in one of the most innovative fields and not just healthcare, but all of the world. We’re now doing gene therapy. We’re the first field in all of medicine to have FDA approval for gene therapy. We’re the first field in all of medicine to have FDA approval for autonomous AI.

Now you’re being diagnosed without ever seeing a human doctor. The cool thing is that at Orbis, I get to work with the thought leaders in those spaces, and we’re bringing that to all corners of the earth. We have ocular genetics consults. We’re doing artificial intelligence in Rwanda and South Africa and Vietnam, and Bangladesh. This is a career you couldn’t, I mean, if you had sat me down when I was in college and said, “Hunter, this is what you’ll be doing,” I would tell you to put down the core’s light and go home.

It’s funny. I can tell you of all the podcast interviews I’ve done. I love hearing the origin stories because you can look back and see the puzzle pieces as they start to come together. When you’re living into it, you don’t see what’s coming because most of us could never imagine what we’re doing. I certainly would not have imagined I’m doing what I’m doing now. Some people have that when they’re five, “I’m going to be a vet,” and they become a vet.

The Mission Of Orbis International

For most of us, we just emerge into our path with all these different dynamics. I think it’s fascinating and what you’re doing, I had no idea of all the gene therapy and all the things that are happening. It’s phenomenal to see that. Let’s go fully into Orbis because I want to make sure, as we talk about you and the work that you’re doing, that everyone reading to the conversation truly understands what Orbis is and the impact it’s having on the world.

Orbis is a nonprofit. We’re based in New York City. We’ve got 330 employees all around the world. We started on a DC-8 aircraft, where we took off in 1982. The whole purpose of the plane was to have an eye hospital on board, not only to give the highest level of eye care possible, but to create a global classroom. We’re still doing that. I’ll be in Rwanda soon enough with our Flying Eye Hospital team.

To me, when you watch the news, it can be very depressing watching all the things that are happening. When you go on that plane and you watch people from fourteen different countries, all focused on helping that patient and exchanging skills and ideas, it is the best example of functional diplomacy I’ve ever seen in my life.

The plane is only about 15% to 20% of what we do. We also have the world’s largest distance learning and telemedicine platform, where there’s a child who has eye cancer in Mongolia being connected to a doctor who’s an expert at St. Jude Hospital here in Memphis. These are all technologies that I could never have guessed possible. I’m super proud, for example, of our team in Ethiopia.

We have 73 full-time people who are distributing over $200 million worth of donated antibiotics to get rid of an infectious cause of blindness called trachoma. If I live another 10 to 15 years, I think we’re going to get it off the face of the earth. That is an incredible feeling to be part of a team that’s putting a dent in the universe and getting a horrible disease off the face of the earth.

That is amazing, Hunter. It is truly a global community effort. Everyone’s coming together, no matter where you are. Is this a standard that other parts of medicine are able to replicate or take from what you’re doing?

Yeah, and I think distance learning and telemedicine, all of that is now omnipresent in medicine. One of the things that makes ophthalmology such a beautiful field, we don’t need intensive care units. We don’t need blood transfusions. The surgery, believe it or not, there are actually cataract surgeons still today that can do it without electricity.

One of the things I would say is the miracle of sight can be restored in ten minutes, and sometimes even with procedures that are using flashlights or even flashlights sometimes to do cataract surgery. For me, that’s what I love is that Orbis is uniquely positioned to leverage technology and different platforms. I don’t think there’s another surgical field that can do that as well as we have.

Certainly, when David Peyton, one of the pioneers and one of the founders of Orbis, came up with this concept, this was in the mid ‘70s. The way to connect people was flying. You had to do face-to-face. Now, we’re using artificial intelligence. We’re using what you and I are doing. I can sit and watch a surgery live and give ideas or opinions, or suggestions to the doctors, even though they’re in Zambia or another country thousands of miles away.

I think one of the things you and I talked about as we look for this conversation, I think everyone is missing the concept of connection these days. I think that’s what Orbis does. We connect the best professors to the best residents, the best fellows, and the best professors around the world. We connect families and patients to the best possible treatment, and connecting them with hope.

For me, that’s what I love about my job. I see five amazing people, whether they’re patients or doctors, or professors. I see five amazing things, like a child giving their sight back or having a grandfather see their child for the grandchild for the first time. I also have five embarrassing moments. Half of which are caught on film. Hopefully, one of those will not happen with you.

 

I need to see the other ones, though.

There are Hunter bloopers.

Now I have a mission to find those for sure. I want to build on something you said. First of all, this might even be old information, but from the website, I have the numbers of 2.7 million eye screenings, 32,000 trainings, and 88,000 eyeglasses. As I said, that’s probably even older numbers based on how much you’re doing every day, right?

Yes. For me, the numbers are statistics are great and don’t get me wrong. It’s the numbers that drive impact. For me, it’s when I go back to Mongolia and see the resident that I trained fifteen years ago, and now they’re a surgeon I’d send my mom to, or they’re the head of the department. There’s one pediatric ophthalmologist. She’s a force of nature.

She is the first person in the entire world to be using artificial intelligence in her neonatal intensive care unit for premature children. This is someone who, when I first went there, had not even been trained on the disease of retinopathy of prematurity. For me, yes, statistics are great, but I’m a people person, and I love being around smarter people than I am.

I’m always learning, but it’s so inspiring and it’s so rewarding to go back 10 and 15, 20 years later and see people that you mentored or coached or trained are now surpassing you and doing things that are just mind-blowing. The first artificial intelligence to diagnose premature infants is being done in Outer Mongolia. Again, I would never have guessed that if you had told me that when I graduated from college, and I was heading out to Vail, Colorado, to be a ski bum.

Building A Global Community

You talked about community and how powerful that is. I heard something the other day that I was not aware of, but I think everyone’s familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When you get to the top, it says it’s self-actualization, but some of his work was inspired by the Blackfeet Nation, and beyond self-actualization is community actualization. It’s the understanding that we are not meant to go it alone.

We are meant to be in community. I think we’re living in a world, certainly in the United States. You have a very global view from your work, but here in the US, you think of how much division we’re living in, how much us and them mentality. The only way to the future is that we even think about raising our consciousness, is to realize that we are a global community. I feel like you see that better than most from the chair you’re in.

Maybe. I mean, I’m very fortunate. I would say that at Orbis, we have over 400 volunteers from 32 countries. When you volunteer for Orbis, you are a subject matter expert. You’re someone who’s a dedicated, not just an expert, a dedicated teacher, but you’re a global citizen. I think humility is something I’ve learned a lot. I certainly realize there are a lot smarter people than me in the world.

I always tell people I’m the roadie that sets up the stage for the rock stars, whether that’s on the Orbis plane or on a cyber site. I do agree that, to me, my life has been so frontloaded with blessings. I mean, I’m good, and to see those now carrying on with other people in the next generation, and some of the talent. I worked with a young man who was sixteen at the time, who had built an app that turns your iPhone into a vision chart.

I had monthly meetings with him. He’s already sold companies. Is that Stanford? He’s graduating. It is so rewarding when I go see this little guy, who now I have to look up to, who is bigger than I am. I’m so inspired to see that a sixteen-year-old can build an app that has now reached tens of thousands of people and countries and places he’s never been. For me, I love feeling connected to an important cause. I think one of the dumbest questions you can ask someone is, “Are you happy?”

For me, happiness is being in a flow state with amazing people or an amazing context. As soon as you ask them that question, you take them out of that flow state. Now they’re bummed they’re no longer happy or they’re bummed because they’re not happy. The right thing you should be asking yourself is, “Are you doing something personally meaningful? Are you surrounded by five great people and colleagues? Are you growing and learning every day?”

Every day I open my inbox and I’m learning something, or I’m getting a surprise. The field of ophthalmology is just exploding. I will tell you some of my best mentors and what I’ve learned early in my career are from pilots. We have amazing pilots. That cockpit on the Orbis plane, every flight has over a hundred years of experience. We’ve taken all of that cockpit culture and brought it to the operating room. We have checklists, we have challenge response.

This is Mrs. Jones. We’re operating on the right eye. We’re doing this procedure. The concept of team training, where the nurse challenges the doctor, which in a lot of the places where we go, does not happen. We have a very incredible team and an incredible community. That’s what I love. You and I have never met in person, but you and I are having a great conversation. I’ve been working with one doctor for years. I cannot tell you how tall they are, but I know about their family, their children. We discuss hardships, but for me, we’ve never had a better opportunity to be connected.

I think we’re missing those magnets of mission and purpose to feel connected to. That’s what I love. When we’re on the Orbis bus going to the airport or we’re going to a conference, we’re not discussing anything, but helping the next patient, the next program. What can we do better? When you have a mission team like that, that everyone’s aligned, I don’t care if you think this way or that way, when you’re in the OR, this is what we’re doing. I think aviation does an amazing job of that.

You have to be part of the problem first to be part of the solution. You have to feel a connection with the people you want to serve, even in their times of suffering. Share on X

We met, of course, from our mutual friend, Nate, and my son, Luke, is pursuing a career as a pilot because of his inspiration with that. I’m learning so much more about the aviation industry, but we’re all learning from each other. I just have to punctuate something you’ve said, because I think you just got to the heart of the matter.

It is about meaning and purpose, and growth. I think we’ve been told like since childhood, that it’s about attaining something or attaining a position or things or power. Everyone dreams of just retiring and hanging out. All of the studies. We’ve talked about this in some other episodes on this show about true happiness and joy, and what that is in the human mind and body is what you said.

It’s knowing that you’re in service to something, that you are with people that inspire you, that you are in service to the greatest of good in the world. You are living the trifecta of all those things in your job. I think it’s an inspiration because I’m sure there are people reading who don’t feel that way. I think my challenge to them would be “Where is that for you?” How do you find where your gifts meet the needs of the world?

Let’s be clear. Some of the happiest people and most dedicated people I know they’re focused on their families. You don’t need to be chasing an Orbis plane or going to foreign lands. My buddy is a soccer coach for his son’s team, and he loves being a coach more than anything else. Those kids love him more than anything else. I think what you said is important is you got to wake up every day and have someone above you that you care about. Whether it’s a child or a family member or a friend, or a spouse, there has to be something bigger than you on this planet where I think your life becomes pretty vacuous pretty quick.

I agree. Just you mentioned the sixteen-year-old, how much we learn from each other. These conversations are a gift to me because everyone I interview is enriching my knowledge and my spirit. I have been with my company for 30 years for a long time, but I’m always learning there. I forget who said this quote, but it was at our meeting the other day, like I’m both the rookie and the vet.

How Vision Restoration Can Change Lives

I might have knowledge, but a beginner’s mind is where it’s at. Where can I get new eyes? Of course, no pun intended to you about new eyes. I want to go back into some storytelling because you’ve alluded to some amazing people that you’ve met. I’m curious if there’s a story that you can share that either just really solidified that you were doing what you’re meant to be doing or really highlights the impact of how vision restoration can change someone’s life. Can you share some things on that?

I could share a thousand. Every time we take that patch off a cataract patient, there’s a story that brought them there, and there’s a story that follows. I can tell you, for example, in Mongolia, we operated on a young girl. In her first 90 days of life, she had a cataract. Believe it or not, children can get cataracts, and a lot of times it’s genetic. Both her grandmother and her mother were visually impaired from that.

Breaking that cycle of blindness, there is no other surgery that is as cost-effective and has a shorter recovery period as cataract surgery. You break up that vicious cycle of poverty, blindness. In ten minutes, you have them turned around. One of the pilot’s wives was talking to me. She just had cataract surgery, and she was almost in tears. She’s like, “I never knew the miracle that you all delivered until it happened to me.”

I will tell you, connecting, like I said, a grandfather to a grandchild they’d never seen. I had one patient in Jamaica who had forgotten what his wife had looked like. I was about to take off the patch, and he asked everyone to leave, “Please leave the room.” Usually, when a patient asks you to, if everyone could leave the room, it’s usually something bad. He goes, “Could you please tell me what my wife looks like?”

We just take these things for granted, or your son’s going to be a pilot. He had congenital cataracts and all these things. I think for me, the case stories of patients are incredible. Seeing how Orbis and two weeks on the plane impacted a surgeon’s career or a doctor’s career or partner’s career, I can tell you so many of our pilots, they say this is the best thing they’ve ever done and they’ve flown the F-22s and all the big planes and that’s what I want to do.

I want to do Maverick Top Gun. I will say, for me, if you ask me about the case stories, going into villages where they were blinded by this disease, trachoma, and now no one ever worries about it. You’re talking about diseases that have been in every religious text for thousands of years. To me, that would be an amazing thing to say that our team, especially our team in Ethiopia, removed a scourge, a disease that literally has been blinding generation after generation for thousands of years.

Now these kids are running around and living vibrant lives. I think for me, it always comes down to people, and the patients are incredible, but the doctors we’ve impacted. I can tell you, I worked with a lot of doctors. I’ve been working with some of them for twenty years. They’re very famous. They’ve won every award, and they say the best thing I’ve ever done in my life was Orbis. To your point, I know that what is this movement now, the fire movement, financial independence, retire early?

Yes.

I would love financial independence. I hope by the time I’m 60, I don’t have to work for a jerk or work for money. I never want to retire. For me, the joy is having great conversations, learning through conversations, and doing work. To that point, the doctor who created Cybersight over 22 years ago, his name is Gene Helveston.

He’s an incredible pediatric ophthalmologist. He’s written books, designed instruments. Even when he could not travel, he was helping hundreds of children around the world through telemedicine. The doctors that he trained, some of them he never operated with, are now becoming Orbis volunteers like Dr. Rea Molinari. I’ve worked with her in Syria. I’ve worked with her in Peru. She did all of her training through Orbis, largely with the person she never operated with.

 

It’s exciting when you find someone, and I think what everyone’s starving for is that connection, but also knowing that someone cares about them and wants to help them become a better person, whether it’s a better surgeon or a better teacher or a better mother or whatever. I think everyone wants that. I think that’s what Orbis provides to the ophthalmic community. One of the things I want to be very clear about.

Yes, we focus on eye doctors and eye surgeons, but that’s a very small piece of the pie. It takes a village to give a child their sight back. We have the largest team on the Flying Eye Hospital team is the nursing team. They are by far our ambassadors of compassion, and they are the ones that lead our values. We have biomedical engineers, anesthesiologists, but our legal team, our lawyers, help draft the first informed consent and a patient bill of rights, which some countries have never even heard o,f and they’re literally copying, pasting, which I love.

Yes, I could teach almost anyone with an opposable thumb how to do cataract surgery, but how do you teach a medical community to respect the patients, to give autonomy and dignity, to do that higher level of ethics? That’s where like, Manu, who’s on our legal team, I mean, he’s amazing. Most people want to avoid their corporate lawyer and compliance officer like the plague. I invite him to programs all the time because he’s such a wonderful human being.

In everything you’re talking about, Hunter, there’s just this thread of compassion and connection throughout. It’s not which job you do, because everyone is playing this important role in this ecosystem of compassion and help. As I said earlier, I feel like you are. Yes, I think there’s uniqueness about the eye surgery dynamics, but you are setting a standard for what it means, like the model for creating this type of global community. Might not be able to be executed in the same way, but there’s so much to be gained from what you’re modeling.

Yeah, and I couldn’t agree with you more. It doesn’t matter if it’s blindness or women’s rights, or human trafficking. I think someone to be part of the solution, you first have to be part of the problem. What I mean by that is you have to feel that connection. You have to feel that “I am here to suffer with you.” That is the definition of compassion. You don’t know what it’s like to be a street child in India who has no vision. I can assure you that 50% of children who do not have normal vision do not make their fifth birthday by low to middle-income countries.

Being visually impaired can be a death sentence, and people don’t realize that. Being without their glasses, I was in the Rohingya community, the displaced persons, or the refugee camp from Myanmar into Bangladesh. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to have to flee my house and not be able to see because I couldn’t bring my glasses or couldn’t find my glasses. Now you’re in this totally foreign land with visual impairment, and knowing that literally I could get a pair of glasses because I was there, stick them on someone’s face and see their smile.

I know you have a Coke and a smile. I can tell you at Orbis, it’s glasses and a smile, because you walk into a school. We have a program. It’s an incredible program in India called REACH, Refractive Error Amongst Children. That just means kids who need glasses. It’s a very scientific program. It has the world’s largest database for nearsightedness because that is the epidemic in Asia. All these children are not getting sunlight, which helps prevent nearsightedness, and they’re doing all this near work on pads and screens, studying fourteen hours a day.

I can assure you that when you go into these classrooms and you put a pair of glasses on a kid’s face, it changes their life trajectory. They have shown and we’ve done some great work in research, some great research at Orbis led by one of our doctors, Dr. Nathan Congdon, where a child’s visual acuity in China has a greater impact on their academic trajectory than their parents’ education level or their parents’ salary.

Seriously?

Seriously. One of the things that will really blow your mind, and this is where I can sit there and talk and nerd out all day long. If your readers want, you can now look in the back of the eye with artificial intelligence and predict the risk for heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and multiple sclerosis. The eye is no longer the window to the soul.

It is the window to a child’s future, but also to your neurovascular health. There’s now this entire field called oculomics, your audience can read about it, where they now are taking images of the retina and being able to analyze it with artificial intelligence and new things and find out that you’re at risk for Alzheimer’s fifteen years before it happens. You’re cardiovascular risk you’re at 20% chance.

You are now going to an eye doctor and finding out you need to go see your cardiologist or a neurologist or get on a blood thinner. Now, all of this is emerging technology. You cannot go to your optician or your optometrist, but I guarantee that in ten years, what we’re realizing about the eye, we are just now scratching the surface. When you can give a child a vision and give them an eye exam, you can change the trajectory of that child’s life, period.

The Good And Bad Sides Of Social Media

That is amazing because, of course, we think that typically it’s blood work is going to tell you everything that’s happening with your body. Now, there might be another way to do that, which is just crazy. That’s amazing. Do you know what else? It’s funny, Hunter, that’s coming up for me just as we’re talking. I’m even going back to our conversation before we hit record. Here you are, between gene therapy, technology, and the fact that you can oversee a surgery from afar. There is so much technology, like magic, miracles, things that are happening through technology.

It’s fostering connection. On the other hand, at least a lot of the other conversations I’m having on this show, some of the conversations we’re having around kids growing up in a tech world, they’re getting disconnected from each other, disconnected from self, and community. Isn’t that just interesting? It’s just really a question. Maybe you can comment on it about this tension we’re always having to hold between the gifts of something and then the dangers and the drawbacks.

I think everything is a double-edged sword. I would say it’s human nature to do things for good and bad. All technology is a force multiplier. It’s just amplifying the behavior or the emotions that were already there. If you’re lonely, social media is going to make you more lonely. I can tell you the fastest way to remove happiness or joy is to start comparing. All social media is a social comparison. I have never done any social media, I don’t plan to, but I will pick up a phone and call a friend.

The fastest way to remove happiness is to start comparing yourself. Share on X

Sometimes it takes ten minutes to turn a friend’s day around. I have friends who are definitely going through some difficult periods, literally picking up a phone for five minutes. If you don’t have five minutes for a friend, you need to reevaluate your priorities. I can always make time. Yes, I think what I do worry about, and I think Orbis is about, by our board mandate, 35% of our work is children. I do want to make sure that we are giving children the chance to see a brilliant future.

I never paint a dystopian future. I have no biologic children, I have nine God children. Every time I get on the phone with them, I let them realize what a beautiful world we live in. You just need to look for it and stop looking at whatever else is gearing you towards. There’s never been a better time to be alive. You can be a sixteen-year-old now who designs an app and changes literally tens of thousands of people’s lives.

There are tools now that you have at your fingertips. Your little iPhone has every bit of information that’s ever been created by humankind. It’s at your fingertips for free. How you use technology, and that comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. I will tell you it’s our job, and I think that’s where Orbis does an amazing job of vetting technology. When we do artificial intelligence, we have ethics approval both in that country and also from the UK.

There are companies and people that may go around the FDA or things to try to get experiments done. We do just the opposite of ethics dumping. I will say I love the fact that what we do at Orbis is research-driven, it’s data-driven. When I sit back and look at the world and what we’re able to do and how we’re able to connect, it’s incredible. Still, Facebook is great, but I believe in face to Facebook. When I’m at the dinner table, I can guarantee you that at no point will I be looking at my phone, and I can sit for three hours and catch up with an old buddy from high school or middle school.

Within ten minutes, we’re crying from tears of making fun of each other or remembering a funny memory. I think that’s where your sight is so important. They’ve done survey after survey in the United States, and the top three fears that Americans have with health care number one is cancer. Number two is blindness. Number three is paralysis, and every survey they jumble so much of your joy, so much of your connection to your work, to your family, to your activities of daily living, or through your vision.

If someone were to take that away, it would be devastating. I can tell you, bringing it back is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen in medicine. We do it every day. That’s why I encourage people to like A, get their eyes examined to protect their vision. When they’re having a bad day, find out about something they care about and realize that they’re great people doing great work in that field, whether it’s restoring the salmon population or water purification, or helping young girls code.

Whatever you’re passionate about, try to focus and find good people doing good work because they are out there. It just happens. What I care about is helping people see. Certainl,y at the end of the day, what I really realize is my superpower is connecting talented people to patients in need and doctors and nurses and anesthesiologists that want to learn. That’s my superpower. I am not God’s gift to research.

I’m not God’s gift to technology, but my God, can I get them to get caring about Rwanda or South Africa? Some of our doctors do not want to travel. They have personal commitments, or they just don’t really enjoy getting on a plane. Good. I can have you do research. You can do telemedicine. You can do AI. You can contribute and help someone for literally $5 a day, tweeting, finding out about what Orbis does, and letting someone else know about Orbis. There’s nothing more frustrating. I’ve been working for twenty years trying to get Orbis’s word out.

I’ll go back home, and I’m like, “I’m working with Orbis.” They’re like, “You’re still fly fishing? I thought you went to college. I thought you went to med school.” Yes, I am still fly fishing, but unfortunately, it’s not for a living. Yes, I think the most important thing, I know people love to shout out and there’s a lot of venom and vitriol, and hate. Why don’t you send out a tweet about someone doing good things? If you go on the Orbis website, you’ll see hundreds of professors, hundreds of nurses dedicating literally weeks of their life every year to make the world a better place.

I think we’re living in a situation and have for a while, Hunter, where we turn on the news. The news is targeted at negativity and drama, and fear. What you’re talking about is there are amazing, beautiful, compassionate things going on in the world. I agree with you, it is an amazing time to be alive. I wrote down a couple things that I just want to revisit from what you just said. One is the power of our vision.

I think about we talk sometimes in the compassion lab about this idea of wonder and awe. For so many people, it might be watching this amazing sunset or sunrise or vista or seeing the face of someone you love, and just like the world around you. I can see why one of the fears would be to lose that because it’s just so much of our soul connection to our lived experience here. I think that’s powerful.

How To Leverage AI Ethically

The other thing you talked about when I was asking the question about technology and the tensions is that you mentioned it being like a force multiplier. It was fascinating. I ran into some folks the other day. They’re writing a new book. They’ve written several books, but they are actually working with AI in writing the books. The idea around it was that AI is a reflection of our consciousness. It’s a reflection of us, of what we are creating.

There’s a lot of fear around it, and we do have to manage the ethics piece of this. This is not a conversation about AI and what’s happening there, but the fact that we are creators. We get to choose. Do we believe in a dystopian futur,e or do we believe in a future full of the types of things that you are doing and Orbis is doing, and the fact that we can come together as a global community and make real change? I think that’s a powerful message.

I couldn’t agree with you more. I like the concept of augmented intelligence, where these tools, these different algorithms, are helping us make better decisions or amplify the work we’re already doing. I’m on that train. I will say one of the things I love, for example, Cybersight, which is our telemedicine distance learning platform. We were giving a lecture with four amazing surgeons, better than I will ever be at pediatric cataract surgery. Do you know how many countries we’re watching live? Just throw out a crazy number.

50?

108. Half of the world’s countries and territories were watching live, asking questions, and exchanging ideas. I mean, if you ask any teacher 40 years ago, could you ever imagine giving a lecture to a classroom of two countries? Maybe in Turkey, if you’re standing on the border of two continents. We had six continents, all exchanging ideas for free to help children see better, being moderated, and with some of the research from experts from one of the doctors.

She’s amazing, from the Children’s Hospital of LA. You cannot spend enough time with that person, but she cannot fly to 108 countries and teach. I think my point of all that is I do see technology as a force multiplier. What we end up doing with that and what forces and what things we want to amplify is ultimately our soul and our ethics.

Has there been a documentary or anything around Orbis? I should know that, but I didn’t see it out there.

Yeah, there are a few. You wanted to hear a story about embarrassing moments. I will tell you the loveliest. Most of the time, what do they say? “Don’t meet your heroes.” We were in Mongolia, it’s in 2011. It’s sponsored by Omega, the people that do the watches, or Amiga, as the British say. One of their brand ambassadors was Daniel Craig, James Bond. This guy is the nicest. He came on his honeymoon. He had just married Rachel Weisz, who is brilliant.

They came out on their honeymoon and stayed at a three-star hotel in Mongolia and woke up and had breakfast with the team and sat, and did pediatric cataracts, and he lifted kids on and off the table. It’s a beautiful documentary. You can see it on YouTube if you just Google Orbis Mongolia, Daniel Craig. I was so proud of it. I was so proud of the team. As I said, this is James Bond, and he’s the coolest dude in the world.

I got home, and my mom watched it, and I said, “Mom, what did you think of the documentary?” Her response was, “You need to go to the gym more.” Yes, so it’s always embarrassing when the person is supposed to love you most, but I think that story is amazing. One of the things, just like Omega watches, it’s about precision. You don’t realize when you’re operating inside a child’s eye, literally millimeters matter, just like milliseconds matter.

I can tell you, Rachel Weisz, she was not featured in the film, she was not a mega, she asked some better questions than third-year residents in ophthalmology. She is brilliant. My point of all this is that the documentary had great energy, a great cast. You get to see this incredible country. Mongolia is one of the most unique countries in the world. The land of Genghis Khan, unbelievable beauty. The medical community there is fantastic.

As I said, I’ve been working with some of the doctors there for fifteen years. I guess my point is, yes, you can go on our website, Orbis.org. You can go on YouTube and look at documentaries. I would love to see Ken Burns or someone do a massive thing, not about Orbis per se, but about blindness. I don’t think people realize how incredible vision is. I didn’t when I was even in med school. If you read The Origin Of The Species with Charles Darwin, he said, “The entire theory of evolution I understand, but I cannot prove it with the eye.

It’s too complex to be explained by my theory of evolution.” It is the window of the soul. It is the window for a child’s future. It’s the window for our neurovascular health. I can tell you, I can get people amped up pretty quick when they come on an Orbis program and they help take a patch off a child or a pat, especially off a grandparent. You see them smile from ear to ear because they have been blind for ten years.

To me, the most vulgar anachronism on the planet is that we’re sitting here talking about going to Mars, which is awesome. I’m all on that. That’s great. We literally have millions of people here who could be back to work, back to their families, connected to their communities with a ten-minute surgery. I think that’s where we have to figure out where we’re going with humanity.

I’m super excited with Orbis because I have seen changes in technologies and development. I never thought it was going to happen in my lifetime. As I said, my dream, just like Elon Musk wants to die on Mars, I want to die on a planet that doesn’t have trachoma. That’s my dream. That’s the diseasein Ethiopia with the bacteria. How cool would that be if we broke thousands of years of blindness during my lifetime?

Not by me, but in my lifetime, because certainly I’m doing this much, and our team, one of our team leaders named Alemayehu, that is what he has done every day of his entire professional adult is battling that disease. COVID set us back because we couldn’t do the drug distribution. We couldn’t go into the communities, but I am so proud of what Alemayehu is doing and getting us back into these communities and stomping out this terrible disease.

It seems like this is an attainable dream based on where it’s going.

I hate cancer. My mom has to go to chemotherapy every week for the rest of her life. I hate it. What she has, we don’t have the cure for. The thing that frustrates me every day is that we’ve had the cure for cataracts for decades. To me, the fact that we’re still talking about this or that we’re still talking about trachoma, which is in historic religious texts from thousands of years ago, why are we still talking about cataracts? Like that should be like polio. I guess for me, it’d be a life well-lived if I can say, “I’m moving on to the next phase and there’s no more trachoma.”

By the way, I got to work with some amazing people. That’s for me, I can tell you anytime, even people who were on the plane from twenty years ago, it’s the same circus, different clowns, and it’s the same culture and the same can-do attitude. I love getting people get together because some of them are now in their sixties and seventies and have retired from medicine, but they come and they talk to the next generation of people on the Orbis plane. I will say you have two families, the one you were born with and the one you make. The Orbis family is pretty incredible.

Making Your Life About Serving Others

Hunter, your passion is so infectious. I honestly feel like if you did nothing else from this moment on, your life is already very well lived. I want to close out with a few questions around the wisdom you’ve gained from this journey. One of my questions was your life philosophy, life tenets, and I would love to ask it, but I feel like you’ve communicated a lot of that already in this conversation.

The most important thing you can do to others is make them feel incredible regardless of your occupation or the field you are in. Share on X

For people tuning in to us who might feel like, “This is such a cool thing. What I’m doing isn’t of that magnitude.” You referenced earlier, you can make a difference in your corner of the world, whatever you’re doing. What are some of the things that drive you in your life, and what would be the wisdom that you would tell to people tuning in to inspire them to be a creator towards a better world?

I think for me, one of my mentors, name is Larry Fay, super interesting guy, bounced all around the world with him. He would always start team meetings with my Angelou’s quote, “People will forget what you did. They’ll forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” I am not perfect, trust me. If perfect is over here, I am way over here.

I do remind myself, especially as a physician when I’m wearing that white coat or that roll, how you make that patient and more importantly, that family feel is incredible. You can do that as a school teacher. You can do it in any field you’re in, if you have that in the self-awareness to ask, “How did I make that person feel?” I would say the thing I mentioned, and I gave the joke about my mom telling me to go to the gym, also have some humility.

I can tell you, the more I do this work, the more I realize I’m a very small part of this. As I said, my job is connecting the big players to the big problems. I think I worry that in our world, we’re so driven by fear. I’ve made a pact for the last two years. I’m not letting fear, anxiety, or panic take the wheel. If you think about it, most of those are artificial constructs and you end up being your own know in life. I try not to do that.

I will tell you, and I think I just got into a different stage in life. There’s no more accolade. There are very few things I want from me. I’m good. I derived so much more pleasure taking a kid fishing than going fishing by myself, or giving someone a new camera and watching what they just gave my nieces cameras.

I’m so excited to see how they see the world. I don’t know. I think, like we said, it’s not about you. I may have learned that a little bit later in life because I think in medicine, you’re taught to make it about you. There’s a lot of culture there, but I can tell you the happiest I’ve been is when it’s not been about me.

That’s very clear in your choices. The other thing that I’ve picked out from all that you’ve said is the power of belief and vision. Again, no pun intended, but a vision for something better. There are so many themes to our conversation, but one of them that I would want to leave everyone tuning in is that there is a power in our connection and our belief. Each one of us takes our superpower into the arena and connects with someone else with a different superpower.

Get In Touch With Dr. Hunter

Together, we can do really miraculous things like what you’re doing with Orbis. I just want to say thank you. It is such an honor to have this conversation, to have learned about Orbis. It’s funny when Nate, our mutual friend, started talking about it, like the passion from him being connected as a volunteer and working with you has been so huge. I just want to say thank you. You mentioned the website, but if anyone else wants to find out more, contribute help, how would they do that?

The website is the best thing. It’s Orbis.org because we’re a nonprofit, and I love our website. There are some beautiful photos. One of our photographers his name’s Geoff Bugbee. Super amazing dude. I’ve been bouncing around the world with him for twenty years. He has just the best photos I’ve ever seen. If you go to the upper right-hand corner of the website, it will say How To Help? Do you want to volunteer? Do you want to donate? Do you want to learn more?

I would say even if you’re not able to give of your time or money, just getting the word out about vision or Orbis, that’s a huge thing. I’m trying to build an Orbis army. I think our website’s beautiful. As I said, Geoff, the photographer, captures the joy and that spark in an eye that literally, I’ve never seen anyone else do like he does. Go to the website. If for nothing else, you’re going to love the photography.

I encourage everyone to do that. I’ve definitely been to it myself, and it’s beautiful. I agree. Orbis and the Coca-Cola Company may seem like two very different organizations, but I think we stand for many similar things. Community, connection, and possibility for the future. Hunter, thanks again for just taking this time to be with me. I am super grateful for everything that you shared.

We’ve got to get you on the plane.

Definitely. I am all about that. Thank you so much.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Hunter Cherwek
• Orbis
• Orbis on Facebook
• Orbis on X
• Orbis on LinkedIn
• Orbis on YouTube
• Orbis on Instagram
• Orbis Flying Eye Hospital
• Cybersight
• Alcon
• The Origin Of The Species

 

About Dr. Hunter Cherwek

Dr. Hunter Cherwek is a global ophthalmologist with a specific career interest on how training and technologies can be used to eliminate avoidable blindness in low-resource communities around the worldDr. Hunter Cherwek received his undergraduate degree in biology from the University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill and his medical degree from Duke University. After his transitional year at Scripps Hospital, he completed his residency in ophthalmology at Emory University, where he was elected Chief Resident. Immediately upon graduating from Emory, Hunter joined Orbis International, where he was able to lecture and work in over 20 countries aboard the Flying Eye Hospital and help build the organization’s award-winning telemedicine platform, Cybersight.

After working with Orbis International, he was based in Beijing, China, for six years, working with Alcon as the Medical Director of Strategic Markets to help improve surgical training efforts and access to quality cataract care in Asia and Russia. Most recently, Dr. Cherwek has returned to Orbis International to continue to support its clinical training efforts and patient care programs as Vice President, Clinical Services and Technologies.

 

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artificial intelligence, Community Actualization, Gene Therapy, Non-Profit Organization, Social Media, Vision Restoration

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