VA Claims Information

STEP 6: ONLINE RESEARCH

Online research can give your claim a boost. There are three areas where I would suggest you concentrate your energy: Medical, Media, and Government and Support Groups.

MEDICAL

This is the most important of the three. The intent is to research your disabilities, your diseases, treatments, and medications. The more detailed your knowledge the better your ability to discover the areas that get overlooked. These areas can be very helpful when applying for benefits.
  • An excellent site for doing this research is:

    http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/medlineplus.html

    By clicking on the different subjects you will be able to discover a lot of information concerning your personal disabilities.

  • When you research, keep your disability sheets available for note taking. As you find something, make a note of it on your sheet. When there is a lot of information pertinent, make a hard copy for your records (a copy could be enclosed with your claim submission).
     
  • Study and note in the disability/disease definition
    • Symptoms
    • Side effects
    • Long-term effects
    • Treatments
    • Curable or not

  • Read up (you should also make a copy just for your own knowledge) on the medications, especially noting:
    • Purpose of medication
    • Side effects
    • Treatments and therapy
    • Long or short term benefits or problems

MEDIA

Once your medical research is done, take some time to look at what articles are available online.

Research findings are always being published. There might be some new discovery that would be pertinent.

Try to find these links because sometimes the actual disability/disease can't be rated on its own, but if you can show a link between it and some other disability, it would then come under that umbrella.

Example:

Diabetes has been linked to cardiovascular problems. By finding an article that states this, your heart stuff could be related back to the diabetes. If filing a claim that includes diabetes as one of your conditions, the cardiovascular could then be included.

A couple of good search engines are Dogpile.com and Google.com.


GOVERNMENT AND SUPPORT GROUPS

Government Sites

I found this an extremely interesting area to explore. However, it is not absolutely vital to your claim. Where it helped me was in seeing how the government worked my claim, its rules, its restrictions and even its own policies. By learning these I was able to quote some of their own policies at the time I appealed their decisions.