Doctors' orders ought not to be disregarded. In fact, there was a shift made, and I'm sorry I can't tell you the exact year. It was somewhere around 1998, 1999, or 2000—my memory is failing—but before that, physicians used to make recommendations to the chain of command on employment limitations or on the awarding of sick leave, which the chain of command was at liberty to either accept or ignore.
A policy shift occurred in either the late 1990s or very early 2000s, whereupon the chain of command did not have the latitude to make those distinctions any more, but what was written by the physician would in fact be followed. If the chain of command wanted to discuss something or had any difficulty with the limitations, they were to take that up with the physician or the base surgeon and not play that little tension out through the member.
This doesn't, of course, mean there aren't instances across the country, because we can't be everywhere all the time, where things don't get either misinterpreted or forgotten about, or the employment limitation of people is not respected in some way. But if this were brought to the attention of the treating physician or the base surgeon, there would be intervention from the base surgeon to the unit commanding officer, saying, “We heard that you've been making Corporal Bloggins go out on morning PT, and he's not supposed to be running and not supposed to be lifting weights for another two months.”
It's certainly very easy for us to intervene if we know about these instances, but we're not the secret police going out to look at units.