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Video Transcript

Hi, Eric Gang here. I want to talk to you about a case we just won. It was a very big case — it was featured in the media, and the reason it was featured in the media was because of its extraordinary circumstances.

The Case

Basically, I had a veteran who served in the Air Force in Turkey in the early 1970s. Part of his job was to use TCE (trichloroethylene) to clean telephone switches. He was in the communications division and also used a lot of lead solder. When he would work, he’d put the lead solder in his mouth in order to provide a hands-free environment — so he was essentially sucking on lead solder almost all day long, in combination with using TCE in parts washers to clean parts.

During service, he experienced some depression and had some seizures, but they did an EEG on him and did not discover any problems.

20 Years Later

Years go by, he gets out of the service, and he’s fine for maybe 15 to 20 years. But all of a sudden, roughly 20 years after service, he starts to develop debilitating fatigue. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with him, and the fatigue gets worse. It’s accompanied by an extreme sensitivity to any type of synthetic fabrics or synthetic products. It gets so bad that he cannot even sleep on a normal mattress — he has to sleep on a steel bed frame with the springs. He can’t use a mattress. He sleeps on the bare bed springs.

He can’t have any type of synthetic furniture in his house — only wood and stainless steel. If you come into his house, you almost have to decontaminate from the different molecules that you pick up by being in contact with other people.

The doctors told him there was nothing wrong with him, that it was all in his head. My client said, “Look, there is something wrong with me. I know this is not normal.” The VA denied the claim over and over again. This process went on for 17 years. He had several attorneys — all of them told him this claim cannot be won.

How We Won

This particular client finally retained our services at the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, where we were able to get that case overturned on appeal and sent back to the board. At that point, we retained one of the top experts in the world in the area of organic brain syndrome secondary to chemical toxicity. This particular expert was only one of nine experts in the world with his particular qualifications. He was a very costly expert, but at the end of the day, we were able to secure victory in that case.

We won 17 years of back pay for this client at 100 percent. It changed this man’s life dramatically. The only way we were able to win that claim was because we were willing to go out and hire the best medical experts available.

The Lesson

This illustrates a most important point: to win these claims, sometimes you’ve got to be willing to invest money in your case in order to aggressively go against the VA and their doctors. Without that, your chances of winning can become very, very slim — almost non-existent.

So if you have a situation where you have a very complex case that has been denied over and over again, and they keep telling you there’s no way to win it, but you don’t have any experts on your own side — that might be a clue that you need to take the time to go out and find the best medical expert you can possibly find.

If you’d like to find out how we may be able to help you, then I invite you to contact us.