Virginia Personal Injury and Medical Malpractice Blog

Doctors Making Diagnoses By Proxy

It's actually quite possible that your disability case will be determined by something a doctor you've never even met has to say. IMEs generally don't meet or examine the people who they're asked to assess. Instead, they review the files you've sent to the insurance company and, once in a blue moon, speak to your treating physicians. It's no wonder why they do it. It's difficult to get doctors and patients together over great distances, it lessens the possibility of a plaintiff unduly affecting or trying to embellish results (which they can tell), and it depersonalizes the process so they don't have to feel bad about denying benefits to people they like and feel sorry for.

But in this case they go beyond that. They don't even contact the treating physicians, those who have medical knowledge and know the facts of the case the best. Of course they're going to deny benefits if all they're doing is reading a piece of paper. They can come up with hundreds of excuses to discredit written words because words can't argue back like another doctor can. Not contacting treating physicians, or trying to contact them when they know they'll be unavailable (i.e. around lunchtime), simply makes the IME's job easier and it's no shock that it's incredibly common in this industry of the underhanded.

In the case of Schully v. Continental Casualty Company this was exactly the case. Click the link to read a news blurb followed by a press release and the entire opinion on the case involving IMEs and their diagnoses by proxy .