Contextual Assessment of Retinal Injuries – Tasks of the Ophthalmological Expert

Abstract

The ophthalmologic assessment of causal relationships is subject to formal guidelines, depending on the legal field (social law in the statutory accident insurance, civil law in the private accident insurance). After determining all objective and subjective findings of the individual case with complete recording of the medical facts, the ophthalmologist has the task of making a summarizing assessment of the existing cause-and-effect relationship. With regard to the distinction between retinal damage caused by an accident or retinal disease not caused by an accident, it is necessary to weigh up the natural causality according to the state of medical experience on the basis of the criteria strength of association, consistency, specificity, temporal sequence, dose dependence, agreement with previous findings, experimental reliability and analogous consideration. All records of medical findings from the patient's medical history and the individual description of the accident must be included in the expert opinion. In the case of several competing causes (often accident and pre-existing damage), the social law in the statutory accident insurance must present the causal contributions with roughly estimated probabilities. In civil law, valid for the private accident insurance, the existence of partial causality (approx. 25, 50, 75%) must be evaluated.