On the last day of this year I was granted a victory in a workers compensation case that I have been pursuing for several years for an injured Hispanic worker. The case is: Guzman v. Labor Commission, Case No. 20140662-CA and as soon as I can, I’ll post a link to it. He had been working for over a decade doing an extremely arduous job in a pig farm. We have him to thank for the ham, pork, bacon and pork roasts we eat.
He provides a service every bit as important as what anyone else does in our society.
My practice as an attorney for employed workers has demonstrated to me that usually and thankfully, subconsciously (but sometimes consciously) there is a prejudice against certain races, against women and against certain professions. It is harder for these groups to get their benefits. This is for many reasons that start at the very beginning of their injury at work. They are treated more harshly by their supervisors and bosses. They are treated poorly by our industrial medical complex. And they are treated with greater disregard by our Labor Commission.
In this particular case, the Labor Commission’s Appeals Board bent over backwards to misconstrue the evidence, twist the law into something unrecognizable to try to deny my client his benefits, and elevated the role that medical panels play in these cases. In doing so, it also did what is happening in almost every area of law involving injuries and diseases--it relegated to medical doctors every decision in regards to whether or not the person should be awarded disability benefits.
Doctors now wrongfully dictate when we hurt, how much we hurt, and what the effect is of that pain. Doctors now wrongfully dictate what the extent of our injuries and illnesses are and how they affect our ability to function.
Medical science has progressed to an amazing level in its ability to provide for us great relief from many of the maladies that afflict us as human beings. Because of that amazing advancement, they have extrapolated from this achievement and become very arrogant and think they can make certain types of decisions that their science is too imperfect to determine. My further sentiment is depicted in the letter that I posted to the attorneys that practice in my area of law. It is as follows:
Dear LightSaber Masters,
Attached is an appellate victory I had at the end of the year. It’s a short read but verifies the role of medical panels. Their role is not to be the judge, jury and executioner.
We as a country, as a state, and as a group of lawyers are relegating to doctors the absolute and infallible role of determining who is injured, how they were injured, why they are injured, what their limitations and restrictions are, whether they should be believed, whether they are worthy to be believed, and whether or not they are disabled and deserve workers compensation, Social Security, and long-term disability benefits.
I know many of you think that they actually can do all of these things, but the truth of the matter is, they’re one of those blind persons holding onto one part of the elephant. We think and they think that just because they know all there is to know about the elephant’s hind end, that they can extrapolate therefrom and not only tell us what the whole beast looks like, they can tell us where it’s been, who it’s slept with, the purity of its heart, the thoughts in its head, and where it’s going. They can’t. They only truly know one part of the picture that has to be combined with the testimony of the worker, the expertise of the vocational experts and the decisions that the ALJ must make.
I know this is just a workers compensation list serve, but for those of you who practice in all these areas of law, we need to push back. Doctors know way less than they think they do, doctors are asked by lawyers to answer questions that they cannot answer honestly, and we need to find a way to ensure that doctors with a healthy sense of humility and a good self-awareness of the limits of their science, serve on our medical panels and perform evaluations as medical experts. Impossible to achieve? I don’t think so. We just haven’t tried hard enough.
Sincerely yours,
your humble, LightSaber Caddy and Repair Person,
Loren M. Lambert
Loren M. Lambert, January 2, 2016 ©
He provides a service every bit as important as what anyone else does in our society.
My practice as an attorney for employed workers has demonstrated to me that usually and thankfully, subconsciously (but sometimes consciously) there is a prejudice against certain races, against women and against certain professions. It is harder for these groups to get their benefits. This is for many reasons that start at the very beginning of their injury at work. They are treated more harshly by their supervisors and bosses. They are treated poorly by our industrial medical complex. And they are treated with greater disregard by our Labor Commission.
In this particular case, the Labor Commission’s Appeals Board bent over backwards to misconstrue the evidence, twist the law into something unrecognizable to try to deny my client his benefits, and elevated the role that medical panels play in these cases. In doing so, it also did what is happening in almost every area of law involving injuries and diseases--it relegated to medical doctors every decision in regards to whether or not the person should be awarded disability benefits.
Doctors now wrongfully dictate when we hurt, how much we hurt, and what the effect is of that pain. Doctors now wrongfully dictate what the extent of our injuries and illnesses are and how they affect our ability to function.
Medical science has progressed to an amazing level in its ability to provide for us great relief from many of the maladies that afflict us as human beings. Because of that amazing advancement, they have extrapolated from this achievement and become very arrogant and think they can make certain types of decisions that their science is too imperfect to determine. My further sentiment is depicted in the letter that I posted to the attorneys that practice in my area of law. It is as follows:
Dear LightSaber Masters,
Attached is an appellate victory I had at the end of the year. It’s a short read but verifies the role of medical panels. Their role is not to be the judge, jury and executioner.
We as a country, as a state, and as a group of lawyers are relegating to doctors the absolute and infallible role of determining who is injured, how they were injured, why they are injured, what their limitations and restrictions are, whether they should be believed, whether they are worthy to be believed, and whether or not they are disabled and deserve workers compensation, Social Security, and long-term disability benefits.
I know many of you think that they actually can do all of these things, but the truth of the matter is, they’re one of those blind persons holding onto one part of the elephant. We think and they think that just because they know all there is to know about the elephant’s hind end, that they can extrapolate therefrom and not only tell us what the whole beast looks like, they can tell us where it’s been, who it’s slept with, the purity of its heart, the thoughts in its head, and where it’s going. They can’t. They only truly know one part of the picture that has to be combined with the testimony of the worker, the expertise of the vocational experts and the decisions that the ALJ must make.
I know this is just a workers compensation list serve, but for those of you who practice in all these areas of law, we need to push back. Doctors know way less than they think they do, doctors are asked by lawyers to answer questions that they cannot answer honestly, and we need to find a way to ensure that doctors with a healthy sense of humility and a good self-awareness of the limits of their science, serve on our medical panels and perform evaluations as medical experts. Impossible to achieve? I don’t think so. We just haven’t tried hard enough.
Sincerely yours,
your humble, LightSaber Caddy and Repair Person,
Loren M. Lambert
Loren M. Lambert, January 2, 2016 ©
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