Hi, I’m Sharon Christie your nurse attorney for social security disability benefits. Today I wanted to talk about what the doctors who work for social security are looking for when they look at your medical records. 

Now if you’ve been watching my videos you know that at the initial stage and at the reconsideration stage your medical evidence is sent to medical doctors who work for social security doing nothing but reviewing medical evidence and they’ll write up a report of their opinions and their findings. So, what are they looking for in terms of disability to try to decide whether you are disabled or not?

What they’re looking for is what are what we call functional limitations. Now what does that mean? What that means is they are looking for the evidence that shows first of all what is wrong with you. Secondly, what treatments have you tried and how have you responded to those treatments? Then most importantly what functional limitations do you have even with all the treatment that you’ve received. 

Now functional limitations mean how does your condition with treatment interfere with your day-to-day functioning. Then how would that interfere with your ability to work. So, lets take the example of someone who has herniated discs that cause severe pain. Ultimately, they’ve tried physical therapy, they tried injections, they tried medications, none of that relieved the pain or didn’t relieve it significantly. Then they had to go on to have surgery. Even after the surgery This is somebody who still has sever pain in their back, it may move to their legs, it may affect a lot of functional activities like walking. 

Now this may be somebody who can now only walk with a cane or a walker because they’re not steady enough to walk by themselves. They can only walk short distances, maybe a block, maybe a little more than that, maybe a little less before they have to stop. This is somebody who functionally trying to sit is having a lot of problems because while they can do it for a while in a regular or straight back chair, maybe 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes. Then the pain is so severe they have to go lie down. This is somebody who has interference in functional limitations in terms of just doing regular chores around the house. They can’t bend, they can’t twist, they can’t stoop down or kneel like to scrub a floor. They can’t do that. They can’t even bend over to use that swifter mop because there is too much pain in the back. 

So, those are some examples of functional limitations and what these doctors are looking for is what does the evidence show about those limitations. Now how’s that going to show up in your medical records? The biggest way it’s going to show up is if you’re telling your doctors. You have to tell your doctors not only what your symptoms are and what they problems are that you’re having, how you’re reacting to the medicine, but tell them (your doctor) what problems you still have just doing your regular day to day activities. Bathing, dressing, preparing meals, doing your chores around the house, driving your car, going to the store if you have to go to the grocery store, going to the doctor’s office itself. Maybe you even have difficulty getting into the office, walking into the office. You want to make sure that you tell your doctor all of those problems so he or she gets a better understanding of how limited you are and that may you know then feed into in effect what kind of treatment might be necessary. Also, so that we can have a record in your medical evidence of what limitations you have. 

Then the doctors reviewing the records for social security will see it and they then have to correlate it with your medical problems. To determine whether they believe the level of impairment you have, the level of functional limitation you have is consistent with the medical problems that are proven by your medical records. 

So, it is a process but the way that you can help yourself the most is to be very clear with your doctors about what your functional limitations are and how your condition affects you on a day-to-day basis.