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Is the social security disability system not sympathetic to pain?
Unfortunately, the reality is that SSA is almost completely oblivious to an indvidual's pain. In far too many social security disability and ssi cases, an individual's medical condition will subject them to unrelenting daily pain...yet they will find no relief from the social security administration. In one situation, a man applying for disability resumed his old job as a security guard. As it turns out, after nearly three months back on the job, his back condition had become worse than before, and his pain had made it impossible for him to get to his job. Despite his intense physical distress, though, this individual only gave up on his latest attempt to work after his doctor ordered a new MRI of his lower back and recommended that he stay home. How should this gentleman's situation be viewed? The bottom line is that he should be applauded for making a valiant attempt to return to work, even if the attempt itself was medically ill-advised. However, this is not how the social security disability evaluation system would view his attempt to go back to work. For SSA, none of the following would be preeminent issues:
Truthfully, a claimant's allegations of pain receive little consideration at all in the social security disability and ssi disability system. And it is for this reason that claimant's with severe pain resulting from a number of different impairments usually find themselves in the position of having to endure an often years-long appeal process. What the social security administration almost always fails to consider in cases involving chronic and persistent pain is the fact that individuals with chronic complaints of pain are not simply limited in their physical capacities. They must also deal with the emotional and psychological fallout of such pain. Naturally, of course, pain that "never seems to go away" is a significant cause of anxiety and depression. And this stressful state is only exacerbated by the fact that conditions such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, and degenerative disc disease are often perplexing to even to the physicians who treat these conditions. Debilitating pain, in and of itself, should be considered sufficient grounds for determining that a person is incapable of returning to their past work and, likewise, is incapable of doing any form of other work. Unfortunately, the social security administration has never arrived at this conclusion. And, in fact, the SSA attitude regarding pain has been so lacking in nature that the social security administration has been sued a number of times over this issue (individuals wishing to research this may wish to do a google search on the hyatt court case in north carolina, as one example of the social security administration's intransigence regarding pain.) Disability Advocates Help with Claims Free Case Evaluation |
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