Jim,
I need some advice regarding my VA claim.
I hurt my lower back on active duty in the Navy in a store room stacking boxes.
I was treated by a hospital corpsman three times and released. He advised me that they Navy did not treat back injuries and that if I pursued this further that I would be out of the Navy. After that I never complained about my back again and just endured the pain.
None of this was entered into my medical records.
As I am getting older this injury is causing me a lot of pain and discomfort.
I was denied my disability from the VA due to lack of evidence.
I remembered the name of the hospital corpsman and hired a private investigator and I found him he is now a retired E9.
He wrote me a letter for the VA saying exactly what had happened.
I submitted this to the VA and they still denied my disability because the 80 year old doctor who gave me my exam said that my injury is a result of my age.
I spoke to a few a few orthopedic doctors and they say that this doctor cannot come to that conclusion because with lower back injuries you can have a back injury that is 6 months old look just like a back injury that is 30 years old.
Now that being said, having doctors tell you that and then getting them to put that in writing are two different things.
What can I do?
Reply:
I doubt there's anything you can do. I have to think that it's very unlikely that the back strain that you experienced 30 years ago is the cause of any back pain you have today.
The injury you had then was acute and transitory. It couldn't have been too bad because you saw a corpsman and went right back to work. Then you went 30 years without another documented complaint about your back...until now.
To verify the injury of 30 years ago is the cause of pain today would require a record of treatments from the start. In other words, you would have seen the corpsman and the injury would have been serious enough to get into your records. Then you'd have been sent on to some other, more advanced treatment.
Even if you'd been warned that you may get kicked out of the Navy, a serious injury would have required treatment.
If the back injury had been bothering you at discharge, you would have mentioned it on the discharge summary. Then you'd have gone into civilian life and the back injury would have needed treatment. If you didn't get treatment for the next 3 decades after the original complaint, it's very hard to say that the original injury was persistent.
We all suffer aches and pains during active duty. Military duty is hard and our muscles get sore and we suffer through it, usually without any permanent injury. Most of us go on to our civilian lives and we recover enough to work at a career, raise a family and so on. Then, we get a bad back, or a sore hip or another ailment that makes us think of a similar injury that happened on active duty.
The fact is that the active duty pain isn't usually connected to our present day condition. If we can't show a pattern of the original injury being treated with some regularity over the years, VA has no choice but to believe that somewhere in that 30 years you had some other injury or you're just getting older.
Not all ailments of aging can be attributed to our honorable service.