Five Ways to Establish Service Connection: Direct Service Connection
This is the second post in a series: “Five Ways to Establish Service-Connection” for a disease, injury or other medical condition that is used as the basis of a veteran’s claim for VA benefits. You can read the first entry by clicking here.
This post - and no post on this website - is not legal advice, is not meant to be legal advice, and certainly does not serve as a substitute for legal advice. Information is power, and we are providing this information to give you, the veteran, some power. This information is not widely or easily accessible to Veterans. It is best to consult with a lawyer familiar with VA Disability claims and benefits or a Veterans Service Organization to examine your particular case.
This post will discuss the first way to establish service-connection: Direct Service Connection. This is the most obvious way that the veteran can establish service connection for his or her current disability. The typical approach is to show three things: 1) medical evidence of your current disability; 2) evidence - either medical or lay - that a disease or injury occurred in-service; and 3) medical evidence tying element (1) to element (2). This is usually the easiest way. Say you are injured in airborne school when you smash your knee up on a rough landing. There is likely to be someone in your class, a family member, a friend, a medic that treated you on the DZ that can provide a statement of this injury. Or, let’s say you were sent to the field medic when you threw out your back changing a tread on a tank. There is likely to be some medical record of your treatment. That evidence, plus medical evidence showing that you suffer from a disability that is linked to that event is how you would establish direct service-connection.
Now, what if you only have medical evidence of a current disability, but no evidence of an in-service incident or no medical evidence linking the injury to the disability? You can still establish service-connection by showing two elements: a) chronicity and b) continuation of symptomatology.
Chronicity generally means that you must show that the condition you are experiencing has permanently been with you, sometimes better, sometimes worse, since you were in the service or since a short period of time after leaving the service. First, some diseases are presumed to be chronic - the list is very long, and it’s best to consult with a Veteran Service Organization or VA Benefits attorney to discuss your condition. By way of example, here are a few chronic conditions: arthritis, Parkinson’s disease, cardiovascular-renal disease, sclerosis, certain types of ulcers, etc. Second, when your condition or disease is not presumed to be chronic, you can submit an expert medical opinion or excerpts from accepted medical treatises showing that when a person has the condition or disease, the condition or disease is chronic.
After showing chronicity, the veteran would also have to show “continuation of symptomatology”. This can be confusing. Generally, your going to need a medical expert opinion, but in a rare set of circumstances, a lay opinion will suffice. What should those opinions show to satisfy this element? The opinion must show that the condition recurred regularly, without an intervening cause, from the date of the injury to the date of the claim. Let’s look at the example of the soldier who smashed up his knee in Airborne school. If he provides evidence that he did in fact smash his knee up and evidence that from the time he left the service (or shortly thereafter) until the time of his claim, he had a limp or favored his knee, and he provides evidence that he now has arthritis in his knee, has he proven continuation of symptomatology? Probably not - he’ll still need to connect the arthritis in his knee to the continuing symptoms of the limp.
These are the two major ways to establish direct service connection for your VA disability compensation claim. A Veteran Service Organization or a VA Benefits lawyer may be able to help you establish direct service connection if your situation doesn’t fit the two “molds” above. If you would like to consult with an attorney at Attig Law Firm that handles VA disability compensation claims, contact us to set up a free 30 minute consult. You can, of course, also contact any one of the many Veteran Service Organizations who may also be able to assist you.
