Chronic Diseases & Employment: Which Interventions Support Maintenance of Work and Return to Work among Workers with Chronic Illnesses?, 2019, Nazarov

Open access, https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/10/1864/htm

 

Alternative "intervention": fund the damn research that will identify the causes and target them for effective treatment. Millions were dying of AIDS until research made it a manageable condition. Only well-funded research with bold leadership and an actual plan can do that.

It takes a long time but it works where nothing else does. It even has a massive ROI, likely 10-100x. The total worldwide research funding on HIV is probably still less than a year's worth of economic losses from its consequences. It paid for itself many times over, even more so once a definitive cure can be developed and all the associated costs eliminated forever.

Medicine and public health need to learn about externalities and opportunity cost. This isn't rocket surgery.

 

Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if there was an insurance company sponsoring some of this effort?

 

Oh, most likely. Plenty of people view the chronically ill as a burden on society and medicine doesn't have the tools to filter those out. Some see it as a perfectly rational point of view and not inherently bad or cruel, just some "natural law".

 

Its is the end product of unfettered capitalism after 30 plus years of companies exploiting the poorest parts of the world for cheap labour and the resulting rise in demand for better working conditions and pay . global capitalism has to reduce or get rid of any kind of benefit system in order to force people into excepting lower pay and working conditions . there is an interesting video on you tube ted talks by a respected economist ( personally I think economists get thing wrong all the time thinking of trickle down economics).

 

There are many people out there with chronic diseases and disabilities who want to return to work but cannot because employers are not flexible enough to make adaptations for them.

Let's sort all that out before trying to change the attitude of those people who think they can't manage.

 

And plenty who would have likely made it work fine with proper advice.

I was working freelance and have always been frugal. I could get away with working 15-20h per week. But I was given the worst possible advice and now have been out of work for 3 years.

This here is the very model that makes the whole thing impossible, including a disability welfare system that refuses to recognize that there are fluctuating conditions that create variable disability. Most of the harmful consequences are the product of this psychosocial nonsense that rejects reality and substitute their own.

The people trying to fix the problem are actually making it severely worse, are told about it and plow on regardless. Ridiculous.

 

There is a mention in the abstract. I think they looked at two trials and found some positive effect.