Do Doctors give medical certificates if you have a hangover?

I’ve never understood any place that requires a doctor’s excuse for one or two missed days. There are a host of illnesses that don’t require a trip to the doctor. The flu, for example. Nothing the doctor can do but tell you to stay in bed, drink plenty of fluids and have Mom bring over some chicken soup.

As a small business owner, if you have an employee who is telling you he is sick when he is not, you need a new employee, not a doctor’s note.

Yep. I can recall a fair number of them caught the flu from drinking 8 hrs at a bar after work. And the end result was the loss of a generous sick day policy.

Now they simply take time away from vacation days and assign them to personal days. They incentivize it by paying them out at the end of the year if not used.

Typical management laziness.

A proper end result would have been for management to discipline (maybe even fire) employees abusing the sick leave policy, and leave it alone for all the others who were using it appropriately.

So often, I see management failing to do their job by ‘managing’ employees, especially the ‘problem’ ones. Instead they institute blanket policies that burden all of the employees. Yes, nobody likes to hold a disciplinary meeting with an employee that can get heated & unpleasant. But that’s your job as management – that’s why you get paid the big bucks. Do your job!

I once worked as a supervisor. The workers I supervised did direct care with disabled people who couldn’t be left alone, and it was a real monkey wrench if someone couldn’t come in. People who had sudden emergencies had a pager number to call (this was before cells were ubiquitous), and then it was the pager person (whichever supervisor had it that week) to start making calls looking for a sub, and sometimes to go in and cover until you could get a sub.

People were abusing the pager, and calling in because they had concert tickets, and couldn’t find a sub. So, we had to institute a policy: find your own sub, and just call us to let us know who was going in for you, and it was all good, or document the reason for your absence-- ie, doctor’s note, receipt from the mechanic if your car broke down etc. The purpose was to get the jerks to find their own subs and quit calling off through the pager for no good reason, but it meant that if you needed a day with food poisoning, you had to make calls when you felt terrible, or drag yourself to the doctor. At least the job had good insurance.

My father was a prof. He got a call from the sheriff once. They had one of his students in jail, and he was worried about making his exam the next day, and if he couldn’t make bail, could he get a make-up exam if he had a note from the sheriff? My father asked what he was in jail for. Turned out to be for non-payment of child support. My father said he could have a make-up exam when his support was paid up.

Uh Huh. Your solution is to fire people who are “sick”.

Your father must not have been a fan of the whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing…

Looking at the replies, this thread isn’t quite dead yet :slight_smile:

No shit. I was on jury duty where we were asked if we had any problem with a three-day trial. (We’re on one-day-or-one-trial jury duty here.) So this one kid said he was okay with two days but on day 3 he had a test he could not miss or he would get a zero.

The judge said he could either make up the test or his professor would get cited for contempt of court and asked for the prof’s name.

I’m in a situation where I’ve been genuinely ill quite a lot in the past year. Now, whenever I take off a sick day, I have to provide a doctor’s note.

As to the OP, I would say yes, you almost certainly could get a note, if you could convince the doctor that you’re genuinely ill. The cause doesn’t matter.

The notes my doctors provide to me say I am their patient and I was treated on such and such a date. They do not mention what the illness is or speculate on why I might have been ill.

I’ve never had to have a Dr’s note. And do find it kind of childish. As others have stated, it’s not often easy to get an appointment on short notice, and if you just have a cold, it’s down right silly.

I am able to take sick time to take care of my Mom. She broke her hip in August and has had two surgeries. My leave is covered under FMLA. I did have to fill out some paperwork for that and get her doctor to sign off on it. Once.

I’ll be taking tomorrow off to take my mom to the Dentist since she can’t get around on her own. I won’t need a note from the Dentist. It’s not unlike when a parent needs to take time off to care for a sick child.

At one time, I even took sick leave myself to take care of a sick pet. But I knew that had to be pushing it and have stopped doing that.

The guy was arrested on a bench warrant for not paying previously ordered support. It wasn’t a question of guilt or innocence. He definitely owed the money, and definitely had not paid it. That’s what triggered the arrest.

This was a long time ago when it was easier to duck paying, and the courts were just beginning to crack down on abusers.

There was a guy at my previous job who could be relied upon to call in sick the day after every single <local sports team> home game. It took a while to see the pattern but once it was figured out middle management was not amused.

Do the forms require a diagnosis? Because a note stating “residual acute alcoholic intoxication” may be worse than no note at all.

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It’s the first school you go to, not counting pre-school, nursery school, etc., and starting around age five if you count kindergarten. In my time I don’t think kindergarten counted because we didn’t have any real lessons until first grade.

Originally the term grade school covered grades one through eight, but since the advent of middle schools I think it’s more like one through five, or six.

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I’ve never understood why the company requiring the sick note does not get presented with the bill for the service… directly. That would quickly reinforce the policy’s importance vs. budgetary considerations.

The logic I’ve heard in Canada - a number of people I heard of used to get total BS notes from the doctor. The simple explanation is - the doctor cannot tell you “you are a liar”. That smacks of pure arrogance. If the patient says “I was sick” the patient was sick. If the patient says “I don’t feel well, I was barfing last night” then the doctor writes “patient was sick”.

In fact nowadays, the doctor does not have to provide details; modern medical privacy laws usually only allow (in Canada) that the doctor say the patient was unable to work. Any further details would be up to the HR department, not your boss, to work on, if they need to know (usually for chronic illness, not one-day things). My wife mentions she has to be careful about asking “how are you?” for employees, because technically that’s none of her business - either they can come to work, or they can’t.

A friend of mine, many years ago, worked in a mine on midnight shift. That had the additional bonus that a doctor’s note from the next morning was valid for midnight shift missed. And as one of his co-workers pointed out, “just because I’m too sick to go work in a cold wet drafty mine, does not mean I’m too sick to sit in a nice warm bar.”

Another had a wife working for a large company that had cumulative sick days. When she was quitting, she had 33 sick days stored up since she never took any. Her co-workers told her, “phone in sick and collect 33 days’ pay”, apparently standard practice with departing employees, but she was too honest to do so.