Sickness certification system in the United Kingdom

Doctors are indeed agents of social control Editor—Doctors are agents of social control and get paid accordingly. And you’d better believe it because it ain’t about to change. A cold ain’t a cold until you say it is. A person ain’t fit to drive until you say they are, and nobody ain’t fit to go back to work until you say they are. Enter the patient. There are the driven folk, those without insight, who want you to look under the bonnet, twiddle a few knobs, and send them magically repaired back on their way. These are the people you encourage to take time off work because it’s all you can do, and often they take no notice. Then you have the amorphous dispossessed. Those who have to work and don’t feel up to it; those who experience the drudgery of manual work when there is depression or pain; those out of work and under pressure to take jobs that are even worse than the ones they’ve lost. These people create the dialogue of uncertainty that is so accurately illustrated in Hussey et al’s paper.