In this article, an Albuquerque NM disability lawyer explains how the Social Security Administration evaluates a claimant’s description of his or her symptoms, including pain.
Your Symptoms
When you describe your symptoms, whether it is to your Albuquerque NM disability lawyer or the SSA, you’re telling them how your condition is making you feel. In order for the SSA to act on those descriptions, your symptoms must be shown to have originated from a medically determinable impairment.
Severity of Your Symptoms
With this established, the next hurdle that you and your Albuquerque NM disability attorney must clear is the adjudicator’s assessment of how your symptoms, especially your pain, impacts your ability to function on the job. The adjudicator will look at the severity of your pain and how long it lasts as part of the process of making this determination.
Variation Among Individuals
Just like your Albuquerque NM disability lawyer, the Social Security Administration understands that no two people experience pain or other symptoms in the same way. Where pain may have a minimal effect on one person, it may severely inhibit the ability of another person to function. Often even people with the same diagnosis and similar test results may experience considerably different reactions to their impairments.
Weight of Your Statements
Your descriptions of your symptoms, for both the SSA and your Albuquerque NM disability lawyer, may have to form the basis of the adjudicator’s evaluations if there is insufficient evidence in your medical record to determine whether or not you can be declared disabled.
Reliability of Your Statements
The adjudicator will apply the combined information found in the case record that you and your Albuquerque NM disability attorney have submitted if it happens that clinical testing and evaluation does not support your descriptions of your pain.
Having reviewed the case record obtained from you and your Albuquerque NM disability attorney, the adjudicator will assess the reliability of your descriptions of your pain and other symptoms. Depending upon the credence the SSA is able to place upon your statements, the adjudicator will make his or her decision accordingly.
Factors to Be Considered
As the adjudicator reviews the information that you and your Albuquerque NM disability lawyer have provided, the following issues will be taken into consideration:
- Clinical and laboratory test results;
- Opinions, diagnoses and reports from treating medical personnel;
- Reports concerning your health record, how your condition has been treated and how you have reacted to the treatment, your performance on the job before you were affected and your efforts to continue to work since your impairment, how you approach your day-to-day tasks and any additional information available. This information will come from you, professional colleagues, medical personnel, your family, friends and neighbors; and
- Impressions received through conversations with you either face-to-face or through the phone by employees of the SSA, as well as what the adjudicator himself or herself notes as he or she works with you.
If You Have Questions
If you are involved in a Social Security disability case, don’t hesitate to engage the services of a skilled and experienced Albuquerque NM disability lawyer. Contact Michelle Baca Attorney at Law by calling 505-872-1142 today.
