Missing Data? Get an Apricot™!

Are you an attorney who has gotten an “awful” psych report on a personal injury or workers’ compensation case? Did the doctor simply not find anything wrong with the patient because he or she did not look carefully? Do you know if the data needed for a complete psychological evaluation were absent from the doctor’s report? If so, not all is lost, get an Apricot™ that will provide you with all of the information and questions to ask the doctor that will expose all the report’s flaws during the doctor’s deposition. Essentially, an Apricot™ describes the psych report’s flaws in jargon-free, non-technical language; discusses specific techniques used to Cx the doctors; and provides multiple questions that get those flaws on the record despite what might be the doctor’s non-cooperative behavior.   You can also write your own Apricot™ with the self-help resources at my website, DrLeckartWETC.com. 

Did the doctor “give away the store?”

Are you an attorney or an insurance adjuster who has gotten an “awful” psych report on a personal injury or workers’ compensation case? Did the doctor “give away the store?” If so, not all is lost, get an Apricot™ that will provide you with all of the information and questions to ask the doctor that will expose all the report’s flaws during the doctor’s deposition. Essentially, an Apricot™ describes the psych report’s flaws in jargon-free, non-technical language; discusses specific techniques used to Cx the doctors; and provides multiple questions that get those flaws on the record despite what might be the doctor’s non-cooperative behavior.   You can also write your own Apricot™ with the self-help resources at my website, DrLeckartWETC.com. 

Clinical Depression

Everybody gets depressed.  However, it is only when that depression is not normal, reasonable, understandable and expectable that it crosses the border and becomes a disorder.  There are many psychological disorders in the DSM-IV-TR that include signs and symptoms of a clinical depression.  Thus, if you are interested in the litigation of psychological claims it is important to know how depression is observable during a psychological evaluation and what to look for in a psych report to see if the author “gave away the store.”

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Cross-Examining Psych Doctors, Tip #20-Measuring Patient Credibility

The first responsibility of any medical-legal evaluator is to determine the patient’s credibility.  Most psychological tests do not have validity scales capable of measuring truthfulness and therefore are useless in medical-legal examinations.  Keeping that in mind, the first step in preparing to Cx a psych doctor is to evaluate the psychological testing data to determine if the doctor has used the appropriate tests and the data show the patient was being honest during the examination. More help can be found at my website (www.drleckartwetc.com) and in my book Psychological Evaluations In Litigation: A Practical Guide for Attorneys and Insurance Adjusters

The End of AMEs?

At the recent California Applicants’ Attorney Association convention in Rancho Mirage some relatively highly placed officials at two very large self-insured employers were overheard agreeing that they were moving away from using AMEs towards a greater use of PQMEs.

So I got to think, “Why is this happening?”

The answer that seems to make the most sense is a proliferation of relatively large defense-oriented medical-legal businesses that contract with multiple QMEs who travel to various locations to conduct examinations. The net result seems to be that there are now more defense-oriented than applicant-oriented QMEs. Most importantly, as we shall see, from a statistical point of view even when there is only a relatively small majority of defense-oriented QMEs that difference can have a huge impact on the system.

Read More: http://drleckartwetc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CALIFORNIA-NEWSLETTER-ISSUE-2-FINAL.pdf

Cross-Examining Psych Doctors - Tip #19-The Mental Status Examination (MSE)

A Mental Status Examination (MSE) produces a set of observations made by the doctor during a face-to-face meeting. An MSE should contain a description of the patient’s appearance and social behavior, observations about the patient’s credibility, statements made by the patient indicative of any possible psychopathology, observations of mood or affect, and measurements of the patient’s memory, concentration, insight, and judgment.  Without MSE data supporting the doctor’s diagnosis the report falls by the wayside.

More help can be found at my website (www.drleckartwetc.com) and in my book Psychological Evaluations In Litigation: A Practical Guide for Attorneys and Insurance Adjusters

Cross-Examining Psych Doctors, Tip #18-Check Out The Doctor's History

One of the first steps in reviewing a psych report is seeing if the doctor took a complete history of the patient’s symptoms or complaints to indicate that their diagnosis is correct. The history section is only complete once the doctor has sufficient data about each symptom's qualitative nature, including its frequency, intensity, duration, onset and course over time.

 More help can be found at my website (www.drleckartwetc.com) and in my book Psychological Evaluations In Litigation: A Practical Guide for Attorneys and Insurance Adjusters