To the Editor.—As director of the National
Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, I wish to enlist the
medical research community in an effort to develop adequate measures of disability
so that future articles will report more balanced findings than the study
by Dr Zwerling and colleagues.1
The authors identified an area of vital concern to both the research
and the disability communities, namely, the relationship among work, disability,
and injury. While I am sure it was not their intent to support a stereotype
of disabled workers, nonetheless, this may be the result. The findings of
this article are troubling because they do not adequately address significant
measurement limitations. In addition, sampling decisions may have been arbitrary,
and the sample choice may have had a negative impact on the results.