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This paper tussles with the policy question, that of integrating people with arthritis into employment, in terms of a dialectic between trouble and trust. It suggests that disability theorists' emphasis on the 'social model of disability' as the definitive explanation for disabled people's unfavourable position in the labour market is limited without an understanding of the body as a set of relationships linking self and outer world together. For disabled people, longterm illness in a public domain such as work may profoundly disrupt expectations about biographical and social integrity, and normative order. Using an in depth qualitative approach, this paper focuses on the differing employment experiences of two informants disabled by rheumatoid arthritis. Their accounts illustrate some tensions between the breakdown of trust, its constitution as trouble, and attempts to restore 'business as usual' in the workplace. The wider social and cultural significance of illness in the workplace, and the need to adopt a more discriminating approach to 'discrimination' are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes part of a qualitative project on patient doctor communication in the management of Parkinson's Disease. It explores how a group of general practitioners conceptualised the task of diagnosing patients with PD and the impact of diagnosis on a separate group of patients in terms of coherence and incoherence. My argument is that for GPs diagnosis represented a point of maximum theoretical coherence, whereas for patients it was a time of maximum experiential incoherence - a tension sharpened by reference to an analagous distinction: that between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. The paper further examines how GPs considered their own experiential knowledge helped patients by way of three key assumptions they held about PD and PD patients: namely, age, the comparatively protracted nature of the disease course and the availability of treatment. It asks how far patients found such notions helpful in their initial efforts to accept the diagnosis. I see this meeting point between two worlds simultaneously as tragic and potentially creative, with implications for more sensitive and effective interaction between patient and GP in this and other chronic illnesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a letter to the editor about doctors and medical students with disabilities.