Articles Tagged with objective medical evidence

Chronic pain can be related to a variety of conductions including joint issues, nerve damage, fibromyalgia, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), spinal problems, post-surgical complications, and cancer. While certain diagnoses can be more clearly associated with a disabling level of pain, pain is usually a subjective symptom. For example, a person with degenerative disc disease will be able to show evidence of their diagnosis through an MRI or X-ray; however, this kind of imaging cannot necessarily measure what level of pain a particular individual is experiencing.  In some cases, people may experience a more severe level of pain than others with the same diagnosis. Pain may also not be clearly associated with a particular condition or diagnosis. Pain can be due to tangled combination of factors that may not be very well understood.

Consequently, although many disability insurance policies seek “objective” proof of disability, in some cases objective medical evidence simply is not available due to the nature of the condition. Even without the type of documentation that is typically considered objective medical evidence of disability (like lab tests and imaging scans), a person with chronic pain may very well still qualify for disability insurance benefits.

In fact, in a recent Kantor and Kantor victory in the case of Hamid v. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in the Northern District of California, the court reaffirmed that objective evidence is not required to prove disability. The court cited to prior case precedents to explain that, for medical conditions that are difficult to quantify through labs or imaging scans, benefits cannot be denied simply because quantifiable documentation is not available.

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