LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Establishing work capacity is a core function for occupational and insurance physicians. I am not aware of any study showing the distribution of such assessments. My presupposition is that the spread of this distribution is considerable. In 2005 the Health Council drew up a report: ‘Assess, Treat, Coach; Medical practice in cases of sickness absence and disability. This was a response to the conclusion by the then ‘Advisory Council on Health Research’ that medical treatments could not be motivated scientifically. The advice of the Health Council was to stimulate the development of evidence-based guidelines (3Brichtlijnen) and the advancement of ‘mediprudence’ in order to improve the judgement formation process of insurance physicians. This issue contains Rheumatoid Arthritis as first example case. Insurance physician Jim Faas and his coauthors describe mediprudence as ‘case descriptions in which the argumentation has been explicitly worked out and provided with professional annotations. By publishing example cases we hope to give you an insight into the methods of assessing and formulating conclusions. More cases of mediprudence will follow. …