Disability evaluation: a fledgling science?

Abstract

Although medicine and law often operate from incompatible bases, physicians must occasionally work with lawyers and in the process reconcile medicine to the legal world. Nowhere is this more evident than in disability evaluation. Indeed, explains Talmage G. Hiebert, PhD, MD, medical director of the American Disability Evaluation Research Institute (ADERI) and the National Association of Disability Evaluating Physicians (NADEP), Ann Arbor, Mich, while disability is a legal term, each year American physicians receive hundreds of thousands of requests to determine it. In fact, almost every physician at some point in his career will be called on to do so. But physician misunderstanding of disability evaluation is rampant, say Hiebert and others, and this in turn invites accusations of bias, lackeyism, and malpractice. Such misunderstanding has been plaguing groups like the American Academy of Compensation Medicine (AACM), the American Academy of Occupational Medicine, and the American Occupational Medicine Association for