Sick with back pain, arthritis, muscle strain or tendon damage? Get back to work, it will do you good. So claims a new study by the Work Foundation.

Many of us would blame work for causing these ailments – collectively known as musculoskeletal disorders. In particular, complaints such as back pain are often linked to chronic workplace stress. Take the stress away and the pain magically resolves.

Psychologists feel that this is because physical pain is often the way that our brains manifest emotional distress: you can suppress it as much as you like, but the malaise will out somehow.

But the Work Foundation wants to whip us back to work whenever we think we should spend a day in bed. We will get better quicker at our desks, says its report. The Foundation argues that a policy of keeping sufferers in work wherever possible should boost national productivity and cut the 2.6 million people on incapacity benefit. “There is overwhelming evidence that worklessness is, itself, bad for health,” it argues.

So ditch those crutches, paid work is the new Billy Graham. Employers would love a miracle cure: musculoskeletal disorders cause 9.5 million lost working days, and cost £7.4 billion a year.

Cynicism aside, perhaps work really can help to alleviate some of our emotionally founded ills. The clue lies in an odd condition called “compensation neurosis”. A report in the journal Clinical Orthopaedics suggests that the higher the amount of compensation someone gets for a workplace injury or accident, the less likely they are to get better.

This is unrelated to the severity of the injury – it seems that often people subliminally feel obliged to feel more ill if they are being funded to be ill. Is it too farfetched to think that some long-term sick-leave payments might wield the same kind of mindbending power?

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