New Jersey Disability Lawyer Blog

Many of our clients have chronic pain and suffer greatly. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that chronic pain affects approximately 116 million Americans (about 1/3 of the total population).

The Institute of Medicine has stated that "pain is all too often undertreated in the U.S." The article goes on to explain the difference between acute pain and chronic pain. Acute pain is generally a warning signal to stop doing something that is harmful to your body. Chronic pain is described in the article as an alarm that "keeps sounding and producing pain long after the original cause is gone, probably due to a malfunction in the central nervous system."

Chronic pain is a terrible condition. Having to wake up each day with no medical improvement is so difficult for our clients to endure. But in order to prove that your pain is severe and restricts and limits you constantly, it is very important to be careful when filling out disability forms and medical forms. Do not overstate your limitations.

Be sure your treating doctor keeps a record of the level of pain that your experience so that if called upon to comment on whether your pain interferes with you ability to work, the doctor can provide this important link between pain and function.

Proving chronic pain remains a challenge in disability matters, but we at Bonny G. Rafel can help.

Each of us knows at least one person who suffers from migraines which often can be managed with medication. For those of you who do not know what it is like to experience a migraine, it is difficult to describe. In a New York Times article titled Migraine Miseries Push Patients to Ways of Coping, the author states that migraines can cause such severe throbbing pain in the head and nausea that the victim may have to retreat to a dark room for a day or more.

Craig Partridge, the chief scientist for a high tech research company, describes a migraine as imagining "someone having driven a nail straight through your head."

The Migraine Research Foundation reported that nearly a quarter of all households are affected by migraines and that migraines are three times more likely to occur with women compared to men. The Foundation also found that more than 10% of adults and children suffer from migraines.

When filing a disability insurance claim citing migraines as the main reason why you cannot perform your normal work duties, it is important to provide your treating physician a list or ledger of the symptoms that affect you and even a migraine journal of the regularity of your migraines and how long they last. When migraines do not respond to medication and cause you to be absent from work on a regular basis, you may be unable to sustain a full time work schedule.

At Bonny G. Rafel LLC, we assist our clients file for disability, and work on appeals to insurance companies to convince them that the restrictions and limitations of migraines can indeed render someone disabled.