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medpundit |
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Wednesday, April 09, 2003As a general surgeon I see similar results about when patients can return to work. In a hernia repair that is worker's comp related it can be months before the patient will return to work. Otherwise it pretty much takes as long as they are given off from work by their employer. Dr. Ira Rutkow, who is widely published on the issue, made a similar statement when he gave grand rounds my intern year, and I thought he was stretching the truth a bit. However it has been my experience in pvt. practice that he was right on. You would think that something like recovery from surgery would be fairly universal, all things physiologically being equal. Never underestimate the power of the mind. But, there is another side to worker’s comp cases. There are those who spend their entire lives doing very hard, physical labor, rarely complaining about their daily aches and pains, but doing what it takes to get the job done. Then in their old age, they suffer the consequences in the form of degenerative joint disease. Professional athletes, some factory workers, construction workers, and the men and women of the armed forces are among them. But, unlike some star athletes, most of them don’t have the option of augmenting their retirement fund by hiring themselves out to drug companies for promotional purposes. As one reader emailed: I just received a VA disability of 70% after fighting with them for ten years. The problem is, I spent most of my military service (26 years) doing whatever I had to do to get the job done. There were dozens of times I hurt myself, shook it off, and went on. Some of those injuries were minor, but a fair number were rather significant. I just didn't see the need to see a doctor about a "backache", and treated myself with painkillers, and went back to work. Frequently, the medical people would prescribe long periods of physical therapy, which took me away from my job or my family - or both - and which seemed to do absolutely no good (and frequently made matters worse). Bottom line is, today I have a back that hurts most of the time, but rarely in the same way twice in a day, nearly constant headaches, a significant loss of fine-motor control that limits my doing several things that bring me pleasure and an additional income, I have a hard time socializing (noise bothers me, and people tend to be loud when they're having fun), and it's difficult to get the government to pay attention, because my medical records don't show a "prior condition" that occurred during military service. Depending on circumstances, it seems that the military medical system tends to reward those that abuse the system, while punishing those that don't. Certainly, those people we used to call "malingerers" or "sick bay soldiers" tend to get better treatment from the Veterans' Administration than the people that put duty first. Seems like you just can't win, sometimes! posted by Sydney on 4/09/2003 08:30:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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