This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Occupational and Environmental Medicine  • Pain  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: Based on their survey results, Dr Stewart and colleagues¹ estimated that 13% of the US workforce experienced a loss of productive time during a 2-week period due to a common pain condition.

I am concerned that the authors' broad definitions of well-being and pain conditions seems overly subjective; diagnostic validation for chronic conditions like arthritis would have been helpful. Furthermore, respondents may have been biased by prevailing perceptions of work and disability within their particular field of employment. The author's broad classification of workers into white-collar and blue-collar categories may not necessarily capture the differences in their industry-specific definitions of type of work, expected and actual work hours, compensation and reward criteria, and performance.

The authors projected their results to the costs to the US economy as a whole. However, this would likely also entail more costs than simply the wage equivalent of lost productive time. Such . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Sanjoy Roy, BPharm
Department of Pharmaceutical Systems and Policy
West Virginia University
Morgantown

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLES

Loss of Productive Time Due to Pain—Reply
Walter F. Stewart and Judith A. Ricci
JAMA. 2004;291(6):694.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Lost Productive Time and Cost Due to Common Pain Conditions in the US Workforce
Walter F. Stewart, Judith A. Ricci, Elsbeth Chee, David Morganstein, and Richard Lipton
JAMA. 2003;290(18):2443-2454.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT