Author Affiliations: Department of Community and Family Medicine, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC 20059, USA.
J Natl Med Assoc. 2011 Apr;103(4):306-12. doi: 10.1016/s0027-9684(15)30311-4.
The relatively infrequent incidence of dramatic outbreaks of occupational disease, as occurred in the past, along with economic downturns, have lowered the medical altitude of the workplace as a risk factor for or determinant of disease and disability. However, in 2007 alone, there were more than 4 million nonfatal occupational illnesses in the United States. Equally relevant is the explosion in 2010 at a coal mine in West Virginia that left 29 workers dead. Not to be overlooked are the ongoing challenges to medical practitioners of managing workers' compensation cases. At the same time, the convergence of demographic changes, changes in the workplace structure, and emerging technologies are reinforcing the views of occupational medicine clinicians and other practitioners that occupational health must be integrated into primary care systems and that total separation of work-caused and nonwork-caused care is counterproductive and arbitrary. Therefore, basic principles, concepts, and procedures of occupational medicine must be integrated into the substrate of information and experience upon which students must depend on entering a medical career.
过去曾频繁爆发职业疾病，但近年来这种情况较为少见，加上经济衰退，工作场所作为疾病和残疾的风险因素或决定因素的医学重要性降低了。然而，仅在 2007 年，美国就有超过 400 万例非致命性职业疾病。同样相关的是，2010 年西弗吉尼亚州一家煤矿发生爆炸，造成 29 名工人死亡。不能忽视的是，医疗从业者在管理工人赔偿案件方面仍面临持续挑战。与此同时，人口结构变化、工作场所结构变化和新兴技术的融合，强化了职业医学临床医生和其他从业者的观点，即职业健康必须融入初级保健系统，而完全将工作引起的和非工作引起的护理分开是适得其反和任意的。因此，职业医学的基本原则、概念和程序必须融入学生在进入医疗职业时所依赖的信息和经验的基础中。
