ABSTRACT
In an ideal world occupational diseases would be prevented. However, often in the real world they are not, and as many as one in five new patients presenting to a general practitioner may have an occupational component to his or her illness. Every medical student is taught the importance of taking an occupational history, the emphasis of this being on the need to think of occupational causes of disease. However, because in clinical practice such conditions are wrongly perceived as being relatively uncommon, the young doctor often forgets this early lesson and simply records the job title of the patient. Indeed, it is quite usual in reviewing hospital or general practice notes to find no reference at all to a patient’s occupation. This lack of curiosity about what people spend half of their waking hours doing means that possible subtle influences of work on health are commonly missed by the doctor, and the perception that work-related illhealth is rare is thus reinforced. Furthermore, it results in the doctor being ill-equipped
to answer the questions commonly asked by patients, such as, ‘should I stay off work?’, ‘when can I go back to work?’, ‘is there anything I should avoid on going back to work?’ and ‘could my work have caused my problem?’.
