Stephen Hawking 'is not on the sick' so disabled should not be, says GP "I had considered, at one point, putting up a portrait of Professor Stephen Hawking in my consulting room with a caption that said, "This bloke is not on the sick."" The globally renowned physicist has motor neurone disease, which kills most victims in five years, but the cosmologist has defied the odds and survived the condition for five decades. The disease has left him almost totally paralysed and he communicates using a speech-generating machine. Dr Peverley, in a column for the doctor's magazine Pulse, said clinicians are being forced to spend too much time assessing whether patients are fit to work, pleading: "Take sickness certification away from us." He added: "The dilemma of constantly dealing with requests to confirm illnesses that I have already sorted out is wasting far too much time and muddying the doctor/patient relationship." A poll of 4,000 family doctors by the Department for Work and Pensions in May showed three quarters feel that - even when there is no medical need - they are obliged to issue sick notes to patients. Atos, the company hired by the Government to carry out assessments on whether people are fit to work, was recently told in an audit that four in ten of its reports were flawed. A Government review said many were of "unacceptably" poor quality. Since the scheme started in 2008, Atos has carried out more than 1.5million assessments. However, there have been more than 600,000 appeals at a cost of £60million. But Dr Peverley praised the company, writing: "In my experience - although it is unfashionable to say so - Atos nearly always gets it right." He said that being declared "fit to work" did not mean patients had to do a laborious job. "Being found fit for some kind of employment by Atos does not mean you're necessarily capable of being an FBI agent or a lumberjack," Dr Peverley said. However, you might be able to work at a desk on a telephone, or hold a lollipop on a zebra crossing. And we all know, without any shadow of a doubt, that any form of regular employment is not only financially beneficial but also leads to less depression, greater social contact, increased well being, a decreasing tendency to addiction and social deprivation, and an increased likelihood of being in a stable relationship. Scope, the disability charity, accused Dr Peverley of being "divisive." Richard Hawkes, CEO, said: "Dr Peverley's attempt at 'telling it like it is' misses the point entirely. Disabled people do want to work, but they need support to overcome huge barriers, such as a lack of skills and experience, confidence and even negative attitudes from some employers. His comments plays to the divisive myth that the country is full of benefits scroungers. We'd urge Dr Peverley to check the facts. Benefit fraud is actually lower than one percent. It emerged last week that Professor Hawking was once so close to death that his doctors offered to switch off his life-support machine, but his wife refused. In a new film, the physicist tells how there was little hope when he contracted pneumonia in 1985 while writing A Brief History of Time, but his first wife, Jane, refused to give in and insisted he was returned to Cambridge from Switzerland. The book went on to sell 10 million copies.