Not ready to retire
Dr Choo Teck Chuan, 80, dentist
Dr Choo’s dental practice, Robertson Choo Oehlers Lee & Lye, was named after its five founding partners, between the 1960s and 1970s. Only two of them remain – he and Dr Lye Thim Loke, who is in his 70s. The others have either retired or died.
But Dr Choo says: “I enjoy the challenge of handling bothersome teeth and toothaches. No two cases are the same. I feel that one of my partners retired too early, at 59, but to each his own desires.”
Three new partners have joined the practice at Paragon mall.
Dr Choo works 5.5 days a week. He sees patients from 8.30am to 1.30pm and spends the rest of the day at home organising the International Dental Exhibition and Meeting, a biennial international trade exhibition and scientific conference. As its scientific programme director since 2000, he has to look for speakers and experts in the field of dentistry.
He describes working on conferences as a hobby: “When you organise them, you are using your brains and you will not get old if you continue doing that.”
In 2009, he helped organise the FDI World Dental Congress, which drew more than 6,000 professionals.
Dr Choo’s parents died soon after the Japanese Occupation ended, when he was a teenager. He put himself through school by working for a doctor in Rochor Road.
He received the Queen’s Scholarship to pursue post-graduate studies in Sweden and Britain in the late 1950s. He met his wife, Margaret Choo, 78, at Singapore General Hospital, where he was an assistant lecturer after his undergraduate studies.
They have three daughters who are now between 45 and 55 years old. The youngest is a senior consultant at the National Dental Centre Singapore.
Dr Choo’s practice was first located in Orchard Road at Macdonald House, now gazetted as a national monument. The clinic has moved three times over the past five decades.
He was working on a tooth filling for a seven-year-old child when the bomb blast orchestrated by Indonesian terrorists went off in Macdonald House in 1965.
The floor-to-ceiling glass window of the room shattered, leaving him with a deep gash on his leg, which had to be stitched. His patient was unscathed. Turning 80 last month has not fazed him. “We cannot assume a person cannot work because of a certain age. The retirement age used to be 50 and now it is 62. Hopefully, there will be no such thing as a retirement age, some day,” he says.