Impairment rating ambiguity in the United States: the Utah Impairment Guides for calculating workers' compensation impairments.

Since the implementation of workers' compensation, accurately and consistently rating impairment has been a concern for the employee and employer, as well as rating physicians. In an attempt to standardize and classify impairments, the American Medical Association (AMA) publishes the AMA Guides ("Guides"), and recently published its 6th edition of the AMA Guides. Common critiques of the AMA Guides 6th edition are that they are too complex, lacking in evidence-based methods, and rarely yield consistent ratings.

Chronic pain: second, do no harm.

Pain may be undertreated--contributing to anguish, as reported by the World Health Organization. Pain may be overtreated--inadvertently contributing to drug addiction, drug diversion, and even death. Pain may be misunderstood-contributing to illness propagation, as reported in somatization literature.

Associations of body mass index with meniscal tears.

Background: Meniscal tears are common knee injuries, with limited reported data on associated factors, let alone risk factors. The objective of this study was to determine whether associations exist between increasing obesity and meniscal tears leading to surgery.

Methods: We performed frequency-matched case-control studies using surgical case data for years 1996 to 2000 from administrative databases of two large Utah hospitals; each case was matched with three controls from a large cancer screening trial.

Presurgical biopsychosocial variables predict medical and compensation costs of lumbar fusion in Utah workers' compensation patients.

Background Context: Elective lumbar fusion surgery is a prevalent and costly procedure that requires a lengthy rehabilitation. It is important to identify presurgical biopsychosocial predictors of medical and compensation costs in such patients.

Purpose: To determine if presurgical biopsychosocial variables are predictive of compensation and medical costs in a cohort of Utah lumbar fusion patients receiving workers' compensation.