If you have been injured on your job and you are currently receiving workers' compensation benefits, your employer is responsible for paying for the necessary medical treatment you need to address your injury. But what happens when you have a co-morbidity such as obesity? This condition can have a direct impact on an injury that affects your legs, hips, or back. Many times the doctors will not be willing to offer surgical interventions for these conditions due to a person's preexisting weight condition, but what if you are unable to lose weight due to your injury? Can you make your employer pay for weight loss surgery? This may be something your workers' compensation attorney needs to put on the table.

Why Does Your Size Matter?

If you are obese, you are not alone. Unfortunately, approximately 35% of Americans are that way. This condition tends to affect more people, or approximately 40%, between the ages of 40 and 59, than it does any other age group, but there is no age group that is exempt.

In addition to putting you at risk for a wide variety of obesity-related conditions such as diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease, and strokes, being overweight puts additional strain on your muscles, tendons, and joints, and can also make it much harder to recover from an injury that involve any of these systems. 

Is Weight Loss Surgery the Answer?

Diet and exercise may not always give you the weight loss results you are looking for. This is especially true if you are unable to exercise due to an injury or if you are having to lose weight in a short period of time due to needing a medical procedure or surgery. In these cases, weight loss surgery may give you the results you are looking for as quickly as possible and will enable you to engage in other procedures that are needed for your recovery. In addition to this, it may also lead to you losing some of your other obesity-related health conditions.

What Are Your Surgery Options?

There are three common types of weight loss surgeries currently being performed, although others are also available:

1. Gastric Sleeve—During this surgical procedure, your surgeon will remove more than half of your stomach, leaving it shaped like a banana. This helps to restrict the amount of food that you are able to consume. This is often less invasive than some of the other procedures due to there being no involvement of your intestines. This may be done as a single procedure, or it may be done as a first procedure for patients who need to lose weight before they are able to have other types of weight loss surgeries.
2. Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass—This is a surgical procedure in which your surgeon will divide your stomach into two separate sections. They will then bypass the lower part of your stomach and most of your small intestines by connecting the small upper section of your stomach to the middle section of your small intestines. This not only causes you to eat less, but what you eat will then move through your digestive tract faster, which means your body will not absorb as many calories from your food.
3. Biliopancreatic Diversion or Duodenal Switch—This is one of the more invasive forms of weight loss surgery. The surgeon actually removes the majority of your stomach and then bypasses an even larger portion of your small intestine than they would with gastric bypass. Because it is more restrictive, it has been shown to result in faster and greater weight loss than that achieved with other surgeries. This is usually only performed on patients who are super obese or those that have a BMI over 50. 

How Can You Get Workers' Compensation to Pay for This?

For workers' compensation to pay for weight loss surgery, it has to be deemed as a medical necessity by the doctor that you are seeing for your work-related injury. It has to be clearly documented that this will facilitate your ability to recover and return to work. Unfortunately, even if you have this documentation in place, your company may still not want to foot the cost. This is when you need to get a workers' compensation attorney involved. They will be able to provide the language as well as the case law to make sure that you receive what you need.