George Berger on Gordon Waddell and the Origins of the Work Capability Test – Beastrabban\’s Weblog

Last Updated: February 10, 2015By

wcaassessment

Further to today’s article about the death toll of Tory evidenceless policies, here’s Beastrabban on the origins of the homicidal Work Capability Assessment. He writes:

A few weeks ago I blogged about a piece on Mike’s site, Vox Political, by Mo Stewart describing Unum’s role in formulating the fitness for work test. This is the prize piece of pseudoscience used by the DWP and Atos to deny people welfare benefits on the grounds that, no matter how ill or disabled they are, they are still somehow ‘fit for work’. In the most extreme cases, this has resulted in terminally ill people having their disability benefit removed and blandly informed that they will have to be reassessed. Just in case, you understand, that they get better.

One of the commenters on the piece was George Berger, who kindly informed me of his piece on the DPAC website tracing the origins of the fitness for work test in the bizarre theories of Gordon Waddell. Mr Berger commented:

It seems that the historical source is Waddell’s work on back pain and non-organic signs. That was imaginatively extended to “invisible illnesses.” The back pain work was heavily criticised by medical people in his specialism, yet he seems to have been protected by Aylward and maybe others. I did not know about the purely medical critique when I wrote this.

http://dpac.uk.net/2014/09/gordon-waddells-biopsychosocial-attack-on-disabled-people/

As you can see from the link, it’s entitled Gordon Waddell’s Biophysical Attack on Disabled People.

Read the rest on Beastrabban\’s Weblog.

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One Comment

  1. wildswimmerpete February 10, 2015 at 5:49 pm - Reply

    Three years ago I had a major stroke, which it turned out also resulted in damage to my heart – although I recovered everything my speech is impaired, but now I need a pacemaker. How well would Waddell’ and Aylward’s psychobabble worked in my case?

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