The preface to this book indicates that its intended readership includes practising occupational physicians and nurses, specialists in musculoskeletal disease, family practitioners, and members of the health insurance industry. But to some extent its content belies the stated target. This is not a practical primer, nor a scholarly and dispassionate review of the relation between work and musculoskeletal disease. Instead it is a very honest, brave, and personal view of how the author thinks such diseases arise in the main from illness behaviour and illness labelling.

Their basic tenet is that musculoskeletal symptoms …