Confirming a long-held belief that workers in some sort of pain cost employers big, the American Medical Association recently published a report citing a whopping yearly loss of $61.2 billion that can be attributed to health related losses in productivity.

The study randomly sampled 28,902 working adults in the United States over the course of a year ending July 30, 2002. Workers in pain lose an average of five hours per week in productivity according to the study. Three quarters of them lose productive time due to reduced performance, not due to absence, the study also asserts.

“There’s a myth about people with pain conditions that they will take off time at the drop of a hat. I think that myth comes from select individuals who are looking for ways to get out of work and they are malingerers,” said Dr. Walter Stewart, lead author of the study.

The study cited headaches as the most common pain with back pain and arthritis coming in close behind. Exact illnesses and conditions were not tracked by the study just general episodes of abnormal levels of pain were tabulated.

“For the most part, the work force in general isn’t like that,” he added. “Most people know that they have to get the job done and they do.”

Given that 97 percent of U.S. workers are on the job on a daily basis, employees go to work in pain more of the than not the report states. Workers in pain might get started slowly, work more slowly and have lots of downtime as a result. But, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they miss more days than the average pain-free worker, said Stewart.

“I tried to boil down what does $60 billion mean to an employer. Providing employers with some very concrete estimates helps us begin to think about what they’re really losing and how much of what you can actually recover,” said Stewart.

He cited health awareness campaigns as an example of what employers can do to make up time lost to pain.