FEATURE STORY — July/August 2007

A brush with fate

As a young child, Cissy Furusho visited Dentistry For Kids for regular teeth cleanings. Now she’s an accomplished pediatric dentist and a partner in the practice

By Rachel Parker
Photography By Lloyd Degrane

Squirming in the dental chair, five-year-old Emily* unleashes a shrill scream as pediatric dentist Cissy Furusho, DDS ’96, ’98 CERT, MS ’00 DENT, ’92 UIUC, tries to wipe her teeth with a cotton ball. *Patient’s name has been changed.

“Oh my gosh, it’s just cotton,” the dentist says matter-of-factly. “Let me clean you off—I made a mess.” She holds a mirror up to the girl’s tear-soaked face. “Look it! Look it! Messy.”

Furusho finishes the job and stands up. “OK, c’mon and get a prize,” she says cheerfully, patting the girl’s arm and handing her a bag filled with stickers and toothpaste. Emily rubs her eyes and takes the bag.

To Furusho, this exchange is one of the most important parts of her job. “Even if a child is crying throughout the visit, the end should always be good,” she says, sitting in a sunny room at Dentistry For Kids Ltd. on Chicago’s North Side. To keep people going to the dentist as adults, “you try to teach them [when they’re children] that dentists are not bad people.”

If Furusho hadn’t learned that lesson at an early age, she might not be where she is today. As a child, she was a patient at Dentistry For Kids (then called Dentistry For Children) and developed such a good relationship with her dentist, Marvin H. Berman ’58 DENT, DDS ’60, that she asked him for a job in high school. She continued to work there during the summer months through college, developing X-rays, filing charts, assisting patients and sterilizing dental tools—all of which solidified her interest in becoming a dentist and gave her a leg up when she entered dental school in 1992. Soon, she was back on Berman’s doorstep, this time to become a partner in the practice in 1999.

“There’s a joke in dentistry that a man who works three days a week is successful, but a woman who works three days a week is part-time,” she says. “If I’m a woman and I want to take off a couple of days because I have to raise kids, what is wrong with that?”

Today, Dentistry For Kids is a thriving business (she and her associate see 50 to 60 patients daily), but it is not Furusho’s sole focus. Each Wednesday, she serves as a clinical associate professor at UIC, teaching pediatric dentistry to third-year dental students. Furusho is also heavily involved in associations such as the Chicago Dental Society and American Association of Women Dentists (she was president in 2005-06), and has made a concerted effort to encourage women to enter the dentistry profession.

In the United States, approximately 20 percent of practicing dentists are female; Furusho says that’s because the dentistry profession has traditionally looked down upon women who try to divide their time between work and family. “There’s a joke in dentistry that a man who works three days a week is successful, but a woman who works three days a week is part-time,” she says. “If I’m a woman and I want to take off a couple of days because I have to raise kids, what is wrong with that?”

Furusho plans to start a family in the future, but in the meantime, she’s busy watching her patients grow up—at least to a certain point. “We have patients in their late 20s who don’t want to leave,” she says. “At that point, we have to say, ‘You really do have to go!’”