Hey veterans.
Travis Studdard, veterans disability attorney, here with another video for you in hopes of
helping you with your TDIU claim for VA benefits.
If you watched my last video, I talked about considering the full effect of your service-connected
disabilities, meaning what are all of your symptoms, what are all of your limitations
of those.
I walk you through an exercise to think about how to consider each and every part of the
disability that affects your life and ability to work.
Now what I want to tell you is what to do with that information now that you have it.
Again, you should have a list of disability and its effects upon your life.
At this point, I want you to take that and try to prove to VA each and every one of those
symptoms.
How do you do that?
There's really three ways that you can do that.
One is through your own statement or your own testimony at a hearing.
Again, I like written statements because it's concise.
It's already planned out ahead of time.
For those symptoms that you can talk about, again, going back to our early example of
a back disability.
If you have low back pain, then you are the one to talk about how that pain feels.
Is it burning?
Is it aching?
Is it stabbing, shooting, whatever, in those types of terms.
You can talk about how severe it is.
You can also talk about, again, using that earlier example of a back injury, how far
you can bend or what types of things you have problems with in your daily life.
You can give a written statement of those things, or if you appeared at a hearing in
front of a DRO or someone else, then you can, again, tell them about that as well.
The second way is through lay statements.
All right.
If you have a wife who says, "I've seen him try to pick up our child, and he winces in
pain when he's done it," or "I've seen him try to cut the grass, but it takes him all
day long because now he can only cut for 20 minutes and then he has to take a two-hour
break because of his pain."
Those sorts of things that they can illustrate those symptoms and those limitations as well.
Family members, friends, all of those are good people to give some insight, whereas
it's not just you saying it, but you have other people as well.
Another way is through medical evidence.
All right.
You and your family and friends, those are lay statements or lay evidence.
We also have medical evidence.
You can have your doctor say, "He is incapable of lifting over 25 pounds," or 10 pounds or
whatever it is.
Your doctor can measure your range of motion and say, "He only has this range from 0 degrees
to 20 degrees," or what have you, "on his back range of motion."
He can write a medical report and you can submit that to prove those limitations as
well.
Again, lay evidence, medical evidence.
Go through each symptom, each limitation, and try to prove it, either through yourself,
through someone else, whether that's family, friends, or one of your doctors.
If you do that, that's, again, going to strengthen the full effect and give the VA a good picture
of what your disabilities really are, which again, the stronger your disabilities are
creates a stronger nexus or link to your inability to work, which is what is crucial in proving
your VA individual unemployability claim.
If you need help with any of that, again, reach out to us at our firm.
Individual unemployability is extremely complicated.
We'd be glad to review your claim for you.
Like this video and check out the others on this topic and others.
Have a great day.