Retirement? Heck no!

“There is no race, no finish line with a ribbon for me to run through at the end,” says Dr. Alice Briggs on her decision to keep practising as an internal medicine specialist and allergist/immunologist at the age of 91. “I very much enjoy what I do and I plan to keep doing it for as long as I can.” Her medical career began in 1955, when the Saskatchewan-born Dr. Briggs graduated from medical school at the University of Toronto. She spent the next five years in post-graduate residency training, and the following 64 years working as an internist and an allergist at her private practice clinic in the Toronto borough of North York. She continues to work two or three days a week at the clinic and has enjoyed courtesy staff privileges at Sunnybrook Hospital for seven consecutive decades. She also did clinical teaching of medical students at the hospital for 25 years. Read: Thinking positive about age may help conquer mild cognitive impairment According to the Ontario Medical Association, she is one of only a dozen physicians in the province who are still practising medicine in their 90s. In April, Dr. Briggs passed, for the fourth time, the five-year review the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons imposes on doctors as a mandatory licensing requirement after age 75. “A fellow internist went through my charts very meticulously and talked to me for about an hour,” says Dr. Briggs. “He concluded I was mentally and cognitively sharp.” The decision didn’t surprise her because she works hard to keep up with continuing medical education requirements and guidelines issued by the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. “I read widely and I attend all the webinars that are available in my field,” Dr. Briggs said in an interview from the cottage-style home in North York where she has lived and raised a family since the early 1960s. “My memory is not as good as it used to be. But I’ve always enjoyed learning and discovering new things.” Read: Prescriptions for financial challenges doctors may face throughout their lifetimes Dr. Briggs admits that the administrative work is “a pain in the butt that might eventually drive me out of medicine.” But, that’s not the case for fast-changing office technology like electronic medical health records and systems. “When I take a history I write it in long hand and my secretary scans it into EMR,” she says. “I get by using computers, but I don’t rely on them. My philosophy in life is to not spend time in angst over a problem. Just start finding the best solution.” Though most of her old classmates and colleagues are either dead or long retired, Dr. Briggs says she feels both welcomed and appreciated by her fellow doctors, many of whom are decades younger than she. “I sense a certain amount of respect from them,” she says. “But I’m just not sure if it’s because of my age or knowledge—it’s likely my age,” she adds, laughing. Born and raised in Saskatoon in 1932, Dr. Briggs credits good genes on her mother’s side of the family for her long life and good health. “She lived to be 92,” she says about her mother, who worked briefly as a nurse before marrying and staying home to raise a family. “Some of her sisters also lived into their 90s.” A top student throughout her academic career, Dr. Briggs was accepted into the University of Saskatchewan at age 16. Four years later, she and several other students from UofS were accepted into the University of Toronto’s medical school. “Back then, Saskatchewan didn’t offer a full medical program so students had to finish their degrees at other Canadian universities,” she says. “For me it was a toss-up between McGill and UofT. In those days McGill students tended to go overseas for post-grad studies, while UofT students went to the United States [and] that sounded better to me.” From the get go, Dr. Briggs said she wanted to go beyond family medicine. “It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t go forward into a specialty that was as broad as possible,” she says. “And the broadness of internal medicine really appealed to me.” She also developed an interest and did training in family psychotherapy. After completing her medical degree in 1955, following with a rotating junior internship, Dr. Briggs did three years of pediatrics and internal medicine—and a year in pathology. She was notably the first female intern in pathology at Toronto Western Hospital. She was also the first female intern at Sunnybrook Hospital when it was still an active veteran’s hospital in the wake of both WWII and the Korean War. “It was full of men and lots of hard-nosed nurses,” recalled Dr. Briggs. “You had to make sure they didn’t see you as a vulnerable female.” Her last training year was at Toronto Western, where she did sub-speciality training in allergy and immunology. She then stayed at Toronto Western as outpatient staff and later switched to Sunnybrook, which was closer to her home. "I had to keep it a secret from my medical colleagues because things were very misogynistic back then." “I got married during my two-week vacation as a senior intern there,” says Dr. Briggs. “But I had to keep it a secret from my medical colleagues because things were very misogynistic back then. I would have got a lot of teasing, which would have diminished my professional development.” After giving birth to identical twin sons—Graeme and Jeffrey, now in their mid 50s—Dr. Briggs focussed her practice more on allergies. “It was more conducive to family life than general internal medicine, which requires you to work more nights and weekends and involves more emergency situations,” says Dr. Briggs. In addition to her medical practice and raising her boys alone following a divorce from her husband in the early 1970s, she co-founded a support group for parents with troubled teens and young adults. She also currently assists another support group for families with members with drug addictions—work that ties in with her training in family psychotherapy. For the past 25 years she's also been a regular volunteer with the Yonge Street Mission’s Evergreen Health Centre, which provides services for street-involved youth aged 16 to 24. “I enjoy connecting with young people, chatting with them, helping them with their medical issues,” says Dr. Briggs. “Sometimes I’m a nurturing mom, if they need that.” Dr. Briggs likes to socialize with neighbours and stay active in the community. A life-long dog owner (though she recently adopted an elderly cat after the death of her 12th dog late last year), she's a 50-year member of a dog obedience club where she acts as an education coordinator, “I walk a lot every day and I like to get out and about,” she says. “I like getting involved with groups, like Evergreen or the local ratepayers association.” According to Dr. Briggs, her old-school approach to medicine meant she was never going to get rich being a physician. “I spend a minimum of three-quarters of an hour for assessments, but many patients with complex needs may take longer than that,” she says. “I’ve never been very interested in money and I’ve never made a lot. I was brought up in Saskatchewan in the ‘30s. I don’t spend and I’m a good saver. And I’ve always had good financial advice.” Though Dr. Briggs has the wherewithal to retire and briefly considered doing so in her 60s, she made a conscious decision to continue practising medicine for as long as she enjoys it and is able to do so. “For me, medicine is interesting and people are interesting,” she says. “Why would I give up something I love if I don’t have to?”

Retirement? Heck no!

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