{"id":4194,"date":"2017-03-10T14:00:36","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T18:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joemillerinjurylaw.com\/?p=4194"},"modified":"2017-03-17T15:30:29","modified_gmt":"2017-03-17T19:30:29","slug":"how-do-pre-existing-conditions-affect-your-workers-compensation-claim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joemillerinjurylaw.com\/how-do-pre-existing-conditions-affect-your-workers-compensation-claim\/","title":{"rendered":"How Do Pre-existing Conditions Affect Your Workers\u2019 Compensation Claim?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just because your employer or the insurance carrier for the employer says you have a pre-existing condition, does not mean you cannot file a claim. While a pre-existing medical condition may sometimes defeat your right to collect work injury benefits, there are exceptions and there are defenses. The best course of action is to review your case with an experienced North Carolina or Virginia workers\u2019 compensation<\/a> attorney who can make sure you get the correct legal and medical analysis.<\/p>\n

In North Carolina and Virginia, even if the work injury was partially due to pre-existing causes, if it can be shown that the work injury aggravated the pre-existing condition, then the employer and carrier is 100% responsible for the medical bills and temporary total disability payments that the workplace accident actually causes. Often the employer will try everything it can to show that your pain and symptoms are conditions you experienced before the accident date. This is especially true if the worker has a permanent injury.<\/p>\n

Watch a video<\/a> from attorney Joe Miller about pre-existing conditions in Virginia Workers Comp Cases.<\/p>\n

An attempt to deny you benefits<\/h2>\n

One of the key arguments our legal team makes in pre-existing condition cases\u2014when the comp carrier is attempting to deny the claim— is to argue that the accident at least partially aggravated your medical condition. In Virginia, the standard is that the work accident must have caused a \u201cmechanical change in the body.\u201d We take it upon ourselves to make sure your doctors are educated that the standard for causation in Virginia is actually very, very low.<\/p>\n

So long as your doctor can say that your current disability and treatment were caused, even to a slight degree, by the work accident, then 100% of the condition is compensable. That means the pre-existing condition really does not matter.<\/p>\n

For example, the most common place where we see the pre-existing condition claims is on back injuries. Particularly if you have been employed in labor most of your life and you are over 50, even if you have not been hurt, an MRI of your lumbar spine is likely to reveal a basket of horrors such as bulging discs, osteophytes, foraminal stenosis, cord compression, and all sorts of other issues. Of course, you can have all kinds of things like this going on in your spine and feel perfectly fine, until\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

When a trauma occurs, those asymptomatic conditions suddenly become very symptomatic, in some cases so much so that you may be unable to walk. Although it is true that many of these conditions took years to form and develop, so long as the treating physician can say that more likely than not the work accident caused a mechanical change in the body that worsened a condition that is now causing you disability and necessitates treatment, then that injury is 100% compensable. The fact that there were pre-existing conditions that were not causing you pain or interfering with your ability to work on a daily basis is irrelevant.<\/p>\n

Prior injuries that have not healed <\/em><\/p>\n

The real problems in proving your case may come when you have a condition that WAS causing you pain and you were treating for that is now aggravated by a work accident. The ability to prove such cases are really going to depend on the level of treatment you were engaged in leading up to the accident, the severity of your previous symptoms, whether you had already recovered from those issues prior to the accident, and whether you were continuing to lose time from work as a result of the prior accident.<\/p>\n

If the prior pre-existing condition arose through another workers\u2019 compensation claim, then sometimes it is appropriate to file more than one claim and sometimes it is appropriate to leave it alone and blame everything on the first accident, assuming the evidence supports that. This is really something that you must strategize together with experienced counsel, as every case is different.<\/p>\n

Additional considerations<\/h2>\n

There are a few other considerations that you will need to review with an experienced North Carolina or Virginia (depending on where the accident happened) lawyer.<\/p>\n