By: Fred J. Lewis
I have been practicing workers’ compensation law for almost 30 years. It comes as a surprise to most injured workers how long their Idaho workers’ compensation case takes to get resolved. The first hurdle that we have in every Idaho worker’s compensation case is that the Idaho Workers’ Compensation Law requires that the injured Idaho worker has to heal completely or come to a place in their healing process that the American Medical Association Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment 6th Edition defines as “Maximum Medical Improvement”. The Guides define Maximum Medical Improvement (MMI) as “where patients are as good as they are going to be from the medical and surgical treatment available to them”.
The writers of the Guides go on to explain that “(MMI) can also be conceptualized as a date from which further recovery or deterioration is not anticipated, although over time (beyond 12 months) there may be some expected change”. The writers of the Guides also state that “MMI represents a point in time in the recovery process after an injury when further formal medical or surgical intervention cannot be expected to improve the underlying impairment”. I have often heard doctors refer to this idea of Maximum Medical Improvement as to when their patient reaches a plateau in their recovery and their injured body part has pretty much healed to the extent that it becomes functional again and it’s not expected to change in the future to any significant degree. If an injured Idaho worker is at MMI it does not necessarily mean that there’s an elimination of symptoms or subjective complaints. It just means that more surgeries or more medical procedures will not result in any significant improvement in the healing of the injured body part. Injured workers can still benefit from palliative care in the form of pain medications, massage therapy, and other pain relief treatments.
Depending on the injury, Maximum Medical Improvement can take up to 18 months for certain types of catastrophic injuries. Therefore, if you’re injured on the job in Idaho you have to be patient with your body and your treating doctors and let the healing process run its course.
Please call me at 208-232-6101 with any of your Idaho Workers’ Compensation claim questions and I will answer your questions for free and tell you if you have a case.
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