Our Medical Director, David Dubin MD, also known as “Dr. Dave,” says that getting medical records prior to the workplace injury is important to establish a baseline.
Once there has been an injury, looking to see if there has been a pain free interval which can suggest that the current pain is the progression of underlying disease and not due to the specific workplace event. Dr. Dave says this is particularly true with spinal stenosis. Getting functional capacity tests is also helpful.
When Dr. Dave reviews medical documentation he looks for lack of correlation between what the x-ray looks like and extent of disease, particularly with back and knee injuries. Misunderstandings about the significance of bulging discs, etc. is very important.
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“The 6-Step Process To Determine Workers’ Comp Injury Causation”
If your medical director IS doing these things you are lucky 🙂 . If not, you’ll need to teach them. Yikes, teaching a doctor, that’s gonna be tough 😉 . Remind me to discuss what to do if you have a medical director who is NOT doing these things. We’ll get Dr. Dave on the blog to help us with that.
