Breetvelt and Van Dam (1991) argue that the appropriate control for a patient's report of
well being is not the report of healthy subjects, but `retrospective pre-test' (citing
Hoogstaten 1985). They propose evidence that while patents may not rate their current
level of well being differently to that of controls, patients may give a much higher rating to
the state that they experienced prior to their illness or accident. In other words, patients rate
themselves as being considerably happier in the past than do control groups