Dr. Liora Ackerman, DDS, MS, locked eyes with 38-year-old patient Marcus Whelan at 3:47 p.m. Tuesday and held the gaze, unbroken, for the full eleven seconds during which Marcus was instructed to bite down on a piece of articulating paper to check the alignment of his newly cemented Invisalign-stage retainer.
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She did not look away. She did not look at the teeth. She did not look at the paper, the chart, the assistant, the ceiling tile, the small framed photograph of her children, or anywhere else in the small clinical room she has worked in for eighteen years. She looked at Marcus.
Marcus, a software engineer who had elected to begin adult orthodontic treatment last spring after years of putting it off, bit down. Then bit down again. Then, on Dr. Ackerman’s quiet instruction — side to side, please, slowly — ground his molars gently from left to right. The eye contact did not break. Marcus, eyes wide above the blue paper bib clipped around his neck, has subsequently described the experience to his wife, his coworkers, his therapist, and one stranger at a coffee shop who asked him if he was okay.
“She just looked at me,” Marcus said later, sitting in the parking lot of the orthodontic practice in his Subaru Outback for what would turn out to be the better part of an hour. “She looked at me like I was a person. I have not been looked at like a person by a medical professional in fifteen years. I am thirty-eight years old. I have been to dentists. I have been to dermatologists. I went to a cardiologist last fall because my watch said my heart did a weird thing. Not a single one of them looked at me. They all looked at the thing. She looked at me. I don’t know how to feel about it. I think I might need to sit here for a while.”
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The phenomenon — what former patients of Dr. Ackerman’s practice have variously described as “the look,” “the look,” “the orthodontist eye contact thing,” and, in one Google review that has since been removed at the practice’s request, “deeply unsettling and also somehow profoundly moving?” — has been observed by what is now believed to be every single patient she has treated since 2007. Some patients have switched practices. Some patients have stayed for years, returning long after their treatment ended for what they describe, on her patient feedback forms, as “checkups, I guess,” and which her office staff have come to understand are not, strictly speaking, dental in nature.
Dr. Ackerman, 49, declined to be interviewed for this article in any conventional sense. She did, however, agree to sit across from this reporter at her desk for approximately twelve minutes Wednesday afternoon, during which she answered every question put to her while maintaining unbroken eye contact at a steadiness that, by minute four, this reporter began to find genuinely difficult to sustain. She is a striking woman — dark hair pulled back into a low, practical knot, no makeup beyond what she described later as “just the basics, honestly,” a small silver pendant at her throat. None of this, she would suggest later, was the point. The point, she would suggest, was never that.
“I look at my patients,” Dr. Ackerman said. “That is what I do.” She was asked why. She did not blink. “Because they are there,” she said.
She was asked whether her dental school had taught her this approach. She said it had not. She was asked where she had learned it. She thought for what felt like a long time, though it was, by this reporter’s later review of an audio recording, only six seconds. “I had an orthodontist when I was twelve,” she said. “He did not look at me. He looked at my mouth for forty-five minutes. He spoke about my teeth in front of me as though I were not in the room. He referred to my overbite as the situation. I left his office that day and I did not say a word in the car for the entire drive home, and my mother asked me what was wrong, and I told her nothing was wrong, and I went into my room and I shut the door for the rest of the afternoon. Everything I do,” she added, “is a reaction to that experience.”
The interview, this reporter would later note, contained no questions about teeth, occlusion, hardware, billing practices, the practice’s growth over the past decade, or any of the conventional subjects of an article about a successful orthodontist. The interview was, by the end, almost entirely about looking at people. “Most of medicine,” Dr. Ackerman said at one point, leaning forward slightly in her chair, “is the practitioner not quite looking at the patient. Not because they do not care — most of them do care, in their way. Because they have been trained to look at the problem. The problem becomes the patient. The patient becomes the problem. The eyes do not meet. The chart is consulted. The screen is updated. The next room is mentioned. I have decided not to work that way.”
Her staff have, over the years, developed a quiet language around the behavior. Dental hygienist Renata Volpe, who has worked alongside Dr. Ackerman for nine years, said the team simply refers to it, internally, as what she does. New patients are sometimes warned in advance, in a tone that Volpe describes as “the same tone you’d use to mention that a restaurant doesn’t take cards.” Some patients, told ahead of time, find the warning helpful. Others find the warning makes the experience considerably more intense, because they now know it is coming and find themselves, in the chair, waiting for it. A small subset of patients, Volpe said carefully, have asked at the front desk whether Dr. Ackerman is married. She is. Volpe always says so politely. The patients always thank her. They always reschedule.
Dr. Ackerman’s patient reviews online tell a consistent story across nearly two decades. Five stars, almost universally. Comments that read, with striking regularity: strangest dental visit of my life, would recommend. I cried in the car afterward, in a good way, I think. She is either the best orthodontist in the city or a kind of medical professional we do not yet have a word for. One review, from 2019, reads in its entirety: She saw me. The reviewer left no further comment.
Asked at the end of the interview whether she had ever considered that some patients might find the eye contact uncomfortable, Dr. Ackerman nodded once, slowly. “Many have,” she said. “Some have asked me to stop. I stop when asked. I never insist. The choice is theirs. But most do not ask. Most, I have come to believe, have simply never been looked at by an adult who has nothing to gain from looking at them. They do not know what it is. At first it frightens them. Then, sometimes, it does not.”
She paused. She still had not looked away. “I am aware,” she added, more quietly, “that some of my patients misinterpret what I am offering them. I am aware that the look I give is, occasionally, mistaken for something it is not. I have made peace with this. I cannot control what a person walks out of my office having decided I meant. I can only control what I meant. What I meant was: I see you. I am here. Your mouth is not the most interesting thing about you. Please do not confuse this with anything else. Most do not. Some do. The ones who do, I gently let them go.”
She paused again. “Teeth are not the point,” she said. “Teeth have never been the point. The point is the person attached to the teeth. I am, by accident of my training, a woman who spends her days looking into the mouths of strangers. I have decided, in the course of doing so, to also look at them.”
Marcus Whelan, asked Wednesday evening whether he intended to continue treatment with Dr. Ackerman, paused on the phone for a long time before answering. He said he did. He said his teeth, in fairness, were already noticeably straighter. He said that was not, he had come to realize, the main reason. He said he had scheduled a follow-up appointment for three weeks from now, slightly earlier than was clinically necessary. He said he was looking forward to it. He said it in a tone that suggested he was not entirely sure why, and that he had decided, after sitting with it for a few hours in his car, that he was going to be okay with not knowing.