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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

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