So it doesn’t matter what your disability is or how many disabilities you have. There are three things that you have to prove. If you want the VA to pay you disability benefits.
The first thing is you have to have a disability right now. And a disability is really just a physical or mental condition. I like to describe it as something that used to be fine, but now it’s not fine. It’s a very broad category. There are a lot of things that qualify as disabilities. The key is that you have to have the disability right now. One example I like to use is that if you injured your ankle while you were in the military, but it’s completely healed. So there’s no medical evidence of a current problem with your ankle, or you’re not feeling pain down there, then you don’t have a present disability in that ankle.
So the second thing you have to prove is that there was some event or illness that happened to you while you were in the military. Going back to the ankle analogy, any type of ankle injury is fine. It doesn’t even have to be sort of the classic, military injuries. You don’t have to get shot in war. You don’t have to have jumped out of an airplane and busted up your knee. Any injury counts, likewise with illnesses, if you got sick, that can count as well. The key is that this injury or this illness occurred while you were in the military.
The third thing you have to prove is that there is a connection between your current disability and that event that happened while you were in the military. And this is what the VA calls service connection. If your disability claim was denied and the VA said, this disability is not service-connected, that’s what they’re talking about. This third thing that you have to prove pretty much always requires medical evidence. Usually a medical opinion. A doctor has to say that this thing that happened to you in the military or this illness that you suffered in the military caused the disability you have now, or in the case of something pre-existing, it made that condition you have or disability you have worse than it would have been otherwise had you never served in the military. So those are the three things that the VA looks for.
Now, this is obviously a cursory overview. There’s a lot of subtlety and nuance and exceptions in each of those three things, but this is a good starting point. So when you start to think about your disability claim, think about what you need to prove and how you can prove each of those three things.