ABSTRACT
Is it advisable to devote resources to identifying psychosocial concomitants of cumulative trauma disorders (CTDs)? What is the likelihood that the disclosure of such concomitants, if they are discovered, will be misconstrued by the public, creating harmful repercussions for workers afflicted with CTDs? Anticipating my conclusion, I hope to show that our culturally dominant model of disease makes it difficult for both lay people and medical practitioners to regard pain and illness complaints as legitimate, to the extent that the health problems generating the complaints have psychosocial concomitants. I shall use results of empirical research, primarily experimental studies of social cognition in illness, to show that the credibility of illness complaints is adversely affected when such complaints are accompanied by evidence of patients’ emotional or social distress. I shall then extrapolate from the experimental data to the world of employees who experience CTDs in office work.
