DRUGS AND DRIVING

that the claimant has adopted the role of the sick person because it is culturally advantageous, because it gratifies his need for dependence or because it is financially rewarding--or for all these reasons. Generally neither the law nor medicine distinguishes between sickness, which usually pursues a predictable and rationally explicable course, and sick role behaviour, which is influenced not by medical treatment but by changes outside the patient-such as changes in the family relationships, or a verdict in a court of law. If the distinction is not made, the sick role patient may be given endless futile treatment until he is so embedded in his pathological status that he cannot escape from ita clear case of doctoring making the patient worse. There may be the common paradox of the claimant pursuing treatment incessantly while proclaiming that it never benefits him.