You May Need Help Proving Work Caused a Repetitive Stress Injury

Certain injuries that take place on the job are easy to connect with your career. For example, if you get hurt in a scaffolding failure or a forklift accident, they will be company reports of the traumatic incident and multiple witnesses who can attest that they saw you get injured.

Unfortunately, people can get hurt on the job in a way that doesn’t have any sort of dramatic or obvious pause. Repetitive stress injuries, also known as cumulative trauma or repetitive motion injuries, can permanently impact someone’s ability to perform a physical job.

Given that these conditions develop slowly over time, it can be more difficult for a worker to connect with the compensation they deserve after a diagnosis with a repetitive stress injury than it would be for a single traumatic event that produced injuries.

An Analysis of The Injury and The Work You Perform Is Often Necessary

Repetitive stress injuries develop slowly due to using the body in the same way over and over, possibly for years. In order to establish that your repetitive stress injury developed because of your job, it will often be necessary to have a medical professional review the mechanics of the functions that you perform on your job in order to determine that those motions directly led to the injury you suffered.

Especially in cases where your employer does not agree with your assertion that your injury resulted from your work, careful documentation and multiple medical evaluations may become necessary in order to convince the necessary parties that your injury directly relates to your job.

Having Someone Advocate for You Means You Can Focus More on Healing

Trying to navigate the complicated Missouri workers’ compensation system while also dealing with an injury that affects your mobility, strength or pain levels can be incredibly difficult. Difficulty focusing due to pain or confusion due to lack of familiarity with workers’ compensation documents and the language they include could increase your likelihood of making mistakes on your paperwork.

Having someone advocate for them and a professional review of all the paperwork involved are both strong reasons that workers often give for retaining attorneys when applying for workers’ compensation benefits. The more difficult it may be to prove that your injury relates to your job and the more contentious your employer is about your request for benefits, the more you stand to gain from getting professional help early in the process.