“I think my wisdom teeth are loose,” Julio says as he leans back in the dentist’s chair. “The teeth aren’t really hurting me or nothing. I just don’t want to wait a few months and have to get them taken out in the emergency room.”
The clinic’s story began in 1985, when patients started trickling into the UIC dental school with a mysterious immune disease that nobody was sure how to handle. Alves, who’d been doing postdoctoral work at UIC for two years, had once worked with lepers, who have some of the same symptoms as AIDS patients. So he agreed to take on the new cases.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The clinic is always busy–Alves and the other dentists spend most of their day moving among five or six patients at a time. They make a point of talking to the patients as much as they can, and they tell plenty of dumb jokes. “We play a lot,” says Alves. “I tease them because going to the dentist is a bad experience for all of us. I have bad teeth, so going to the dentist was horrible for me in Brazil. I talk to them a lot to keep their minds off the future. I want them to be comfortable and relaxed.”
For years Alves found it difficult to persuade dentists to volunteer at the clinic. He still relies mostly on students and foreign dentists to come in one or two days a week, and there are now usually at least two volunteering at any time. “It’s much nicer to be a specialist and work with people who are more educated and have more money, like doing cosmetic dentistry or putting on braces,” he says. “But this is very fulfilling.”
Yet he knows he can’t do it forever. He’s 61, and he worries that the clinic may disappear when he retires. “I am getting old,” he says. “There are only four or five more years that I can keep up with the things I’m doing now. I work 10 to 12 hours a day. I need to find somebody to take my place.”
