Workers in Pain Cost Business Billions
Excerpt by Ellen Wulfhorst, Reuters Health

One in eight workers is in pain and losing productive time at work, costing U.S. business an estimated $61.2 billion each year, according to a study in the latest issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Headache was the most common pain, followed by back pain and arthritis, according to the doctors who randomly sampled 28,902 working adults in the United States over the course of a year ending July 30, 2002.

Workers in pain lose an average of five hours a week in productivity, said Dr. Walter Stewart, lead author of the study.

And three-quarters of them lose productive time due to reduced performance, not due to absence, the study found.

Given that 97 percent of U.S. workers are on the job on a daily basis, employees go to work in pain more often than not, he said.

"There's a myth about people with pain conditions that they will take off time at the drop of a hat," he said. "I think that myth comes from select individuals who are looking for ways to get out of work and they are malingerers.

"For the most part, the work force in general isn't like that," he said. "Most people know that they have to get the job done and they do."

Workers in pain might get started slowly, work more slowly and have lots of downtime, he said. "Some people close the doors and just put their head on the table," he said.

The study was part of an effort to provide concrete numbers for how much time is lost at work due to health problems, Stewart said.

"I tried to boil down what does $60 billion mean to an employer," he said. "Providing employers with some very concrete estimates ... helps us to begin to think about what they're really losing and how much of that you can actually recover."

For example, he said, employers might launch health awareness campaigns in the workplace or talk to insurance providers about what their priorities are, he said.

Reference Source 89

For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
PreventDisease.com's "Quick Prevention Resources".