Former disability examiner, Timothy Moore, writes about his experiences with lower back pain and the Social Security Disability Process:

About one week ago to the day, I injured my lower back. And though I am now fully on the road to recovery, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be saddled with nagging lumbar back pain indefinitely …

… light jobs would be difficult because handling any amount of weight, let alone, say, 20 pounds, would aggravate a back problem. I rediscovered this reality yesterday as I, in a limited fashion, tried to help my wife with groceries. The simple weight of a gallon jug of milk was enough to make me wince. How about a sedentary job? Well, the problem with sedentary jobs has to do with…being sedentary.

As many claimants with chronic lower back pain will attest, being in a seated position can become very uncomfortable even after a few minutes. But even “sedentary jobs” are not entirely sedentary. Most sedentary work still involves having to get up and down from a seated position dozens of times during the course of a day. And this can obviously present a problem for someone with lower lumbar pain. …

Disability examiners, their supervisors, and the medical  consultants with whom disability examiners work all too often slap decisions on cases without allowing claimants reasonable consideration with respect to their pain.

Tim goes on to discuss why disability examiners do not give reasonable considerations to pain. Read the entire article here.

This makes me think of this saying:

The man who is warm cannot understand the man who is cold. 

Pain is by it’s very nature subjective. We literally cannot understand what another person is going through, even it is something we have gone through ourselves.

I recently had a knee injury, which resulted in excruciating pain, kept me from sleeping more than a few hours at a time, and severely limited my concentration. I was not able to walk without using a four point cane. Nights were worse as the pain became like fire on my knee and any movement would make the pain level jump. 

I wondered if I would be able to continue working, and if not, what would happen if I applied for Social Security.

Since I am under 50, I would have to show that I could not perform any type of work which exists in substantial numbers in the national economy.  I expect that Social Security would eliminate all jobs which are primarily performed while standing. But, would I be able to eliminate sedentary jobs like information clerk, or call-out operator, or dispatcher?

Certainly the pain I was experiencing affected my concentration and I felt I might not be able to do these types of jobs.  However, I doubt I would have been able to convince Social Security that a knee injury would keep me from doing any type of work. 

Pain is subjective. You don’t feel what I feel and I don’t feel what you feel.

Social Security is very conservative in how it evaluates claims for disability.  It looks for objective, measurable medical findings.  But, pain cannot be measured, except by the individual. That is what makes pain cases so difficult.

Fortunately, my condition improved and I am back to fighting for the disabled.

If you are disabled due to pain, hang in there! Social Security may never feel what you feel, but you can still build a winning case!