Good. Far too many people get sent back to work before they’re ready:
Injured workers who are seeking to have certain back injuries covered by workers’ compensation insurance in Ohio will have to receive more non-surgical treatment prior to qualifying for surgical treatment under a new regulation.
Spinal lumbar fusion surgery has been used for decades to successfully treat injuries that cause severe pain with certain movements. The basic concept is that the weak part or parts of the spine are identified through evaluations and then fused together during surgery using bone grafts to create one larger, stronger bone. Like any operation, there are possible complications, but many times it is the only way to attempt to treat the pain.
The Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation will now require that, prior to approval of lumbar fusion surgery, a worker must first receive conservative treatment, followed by at least two evaluations by the surgeon recommending the fusion, and a comprehensive evaluation. Additionally, the rule requires that the physician or operating surgeon follow the injured worked until he or she has “reached maximum medical improvement for the allowed lumbar conditions.”
There are certainly medical concerns related to lumbar fusion operations: the fact that this treatment is sometimes utilized inappropriately, or the fact that post-surgery pain medications can cause addiction. A 2009 study from the National Institutes of Health, the US agency tasked with large amounts of medical research, found that spinal lumbar fusion surgeries had increased over the previous 10 years, but that reported patient improvements had not increased at the same rate. However, these new regulations will require a worker to be off of work for two months longer than usual in these situations, and the therapies, according to Daniel K. Resnick, MD, are less effective and “will not improve patient outcomes or cost-effectiveness.”
“The overall impact of this change in the regulations is hard to determine because they are so new, but it will almost certainly increase a worker’s time off the job due to injury,” said Charles Boyk, a partner with Charles E. Boyk Law Offices, LLC, a workers’ compensation law firm in Fremont, Ohio. “With this change, injured workers will need to ensure that they are adequately represented in any workers’ compensation hearing to ensure that their time off from work to comply with these new regulations will be fully compensated. I don’t want to see workers punished with loss of income if they aren’t aware of these new regulations.”
