Do you need a lawyer for chronic pain following an injury in a car accident, slip and fall, or other event?
Chronic pain is defined as pain that has lasted longer than three to six months, though some theorists and researchers have placed the transition from acute to chronic pain at 12 months. Others apply acute to pain that lasts less than 30 days, chronic to pain of more than six months duration, and subacute to pain that lasts from one to six months. A popular alternative definition of chronic pain, involving no arbitrarily fixed duration, is “pain that extends beyond the expected period of healing”.
Toronto lawyer Albert Conforzi discusses the complexities of chronic pain cases in this interview with Rod West from 97.7 FM in Collingwood:RW: So today we’re going to be discussing the issues involved in chronic pain cases and what victims of chronic pain can do to get help. Well let’s start off with a definition. What is the definition of chronic pain?
AC: Chronic pain is pain that doesn’t go away. Typically, in the types of cases that we deal with, it’s pain that lasts longer than six months and has no real sign of letting up, quite simply.
RW: Okay. But in the article about chronic pain I was reading here, you say that the greatest challenge is that chronic pain cases come under the label of subjective complaint. How would you define that? Subjective?
AC: Well subjective is, again, quite simply when someone says, “I hurt.”
RW: Right.
Subjective complaints
Proving Chronic Pain
Diagnotic Tests For Chronic Pain
AC: Well, it would be wonderful if we could develop a diagnostic testing that could provide some objectivity. But I’m not sure that that is anywhere close on the horizon but at the same time, when I look back at my own career which spans about 30 years doing personal injury litigation, we’ve seen changes from x-rays, CT scans, MRIs, each one becoming more sophisticated. So I think that in the future, what I’m hoping will become more of the case is some type of objective testing perhaps in greater degrees of electromyography, EMG testing, which can help measure the ways in which current is travelling through different types of tissue to become testing that could be looked at by medical practitioners with a greater sense of objectivity as opposed to simply accepting someone’s complaints.RW: Someone’s word, yeah. Because the picture with the x-ray, there it is. You see the broken bone. It’s evidenced right there.AC: It’s easy.RW: But a pulled muscle or soft tissue damage, you can’t really take a snapshot at. You might see a dark spot, but that could be interpreted any way.
AC: Any number of ways, absolutely.
RW: And a doctor’s opinion can say or can be credible for so much, but not without actually having proof of, “Well, it hurts here.”
AC: That’s right. The doctor does the same thing as the insurance adjuster does. You go and you say it hurts. The doctor says, “Patient says it hurts.”
RW: Yeah. “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” “So don’t do that.”
Working Through Chronic Pain
AC: You have to be able to take it one step further. But you know, when you think about someone who isn’t able to work because they’ve got pain, when they’ve spent their whole life working, when they’ve spent their whole life paying off their mortgage or paying their mortgage down, when they’ve spent their whole life planning for their kids to go to college or university and all of a sudden because of the pain, they stop working or they limit the amount of work that they do. And they go on disability or LTD, long-term disability benefits, and they get 66% of their income. What person in their right mind would accept 66% of their income when they’ve worked all their lives to create a good work history if they weren’t in pain? What person would see their kids not go to college when they’ve worked their whole life to be able to give their kids better opportunities?RW: Exactly.AC: These are the types of diverse threads that we try to pull together to create the image of what the person is really going through on a day-to-day way. Ultimately, if the insurance company representative was living with the victim, they might be able to see it on a day-to-day basis.RW: Right, but they’re not.
AC: But these people are doing their jobs at an insurance company, but they do it with a degree of scepticism of the veracity of the complaints that are being made.
RW: You mentioned in your article that a victim could actually be victimized a second time by people trying to diagnose their chronic pain. Does that mean they can get hurt the second time or how does that work?
Victimized A Second Time
AC: Well it’s really a case of the person endures the pain of the original injury. The further injury is more in the nature of the insult to their overall wellbeing caused by the scepticism that they’re being treated with. They’re being treated as though they’re lying. They’re being treated as though they’re trying to put one over on somebody.RW: Okay.AC: And that is the second type of injury that takes place and that can sometimes take a huge emotional toll on an individual.RW: Oh, big time, yes. Yeah.
AC: And as a result of that, that emotional toll can cause a person to spiral even further down the drain in terms of their overall function of life. And that’s I think what I mean when I’m talking about a second injury being put upon the person as a result of the way in which the system treats that person.
How To Begin The Process
08:47 AC: Well the best way to begin the process is by following your doctor’s advice first of all. You need to pay attention to what your body is telling you. You’ve been hurt. Your body is telling you that you’re in pain. So you need to find ways in which to respond to that call and that’s usually with forms of therapy. Now, the insurance system in Ontario has been modified as of September of 2010 to minimize the amount of therapy that you have access to. It’s somewhat counterintuitive because your body is telling you you need assistance, your doctors are telling you, you need assistance, but the source of funding for that kind of assistance has gone the other way. That is it’s been minimized down to a rather small amount. So at that point when the insurance company says, “No more funding,” the challenge is how do you get more assistance when you need it? And that’s usually going to be something that your legal representation is going to be able to help you with.RW: I understand.AC: That’s what we do.RW: If people have more questions to find out more, how can they contact you?
AC: They can contact us through our website www.pacelawfirm.com. They can call us on the telephone at 1-877-236-3060. And they can access legal representation through those avenues principally.
RW: Albert Conforzi, Pace Law Firm. Thanks for coming in today.
AC: Thanks very much.