When it comes to suffering an on-the-job injury, enduring the pain of that injury can be hard. But what if things don’t seem to get better, and instead you experience more pain? For people suffering from complex regional pain syndrome this can happen and it can effect your job. So here’s what that can mean for your worker’s compensation case.
Complex Regional Pain Syndrome: How It Effects Your Worker’s Comp
What Is It?
After suffering an injury, most people endure pain, swelling, aching, and a recovery process. But once they hit the recovery stage, things should be getting back on track. Although you may have mild aches, you shouldn’t be in severe or consistent pain. However, complex regional pain syndrome can make that happen.
It short, this syndrome causes your body to perceive your injury as a threat. Therefore, the body begins to fight off this threat, causing pain and inflammation. For the most part, people may begin experiencing this in one arm, foot, leg, or hand. But in other cases it can affect the entire body. It can also cause a change in skin color, sweating or that area of the body may be hot to the touch. As these are all signs of inflammation.
How Does It Effect Worker’s Comp?
When suffering from complex regional pain syndrome, you will experience significant pain. This can make returning to work especially difficult, keeping you out much longer than your original injury. But since it occurred as a result of your on-the-job injury, your worker’s comp benefits should cover it right? While that’s true, it’s not always that simple.
Receiving worker’s comp coverage for complex regional pain syndrome can be difficult for a couple of reasons. First, doctors can use several methods to determine this syndrome. However, since the medical field still knows little about it and because symptoms can be obscure, it’s hard to receive an accurate diagnosis. Secondly, the symptoms may come and go. So you may experience more severe pain at times, then almost no pain at all. Which makes it not only difficult to diagnose but hard to determine what you can and cannot do.
Although securing worker’s compensation for complex regional pain syndrome can be difficult, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. And if you are suffering from this due to a workplace injury, you want to fight for the benefits you deserve.