Court Opinion

ID: 9532296
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 04:20:04.063442+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:28:43.599870
License: Public Domain

OTIS, Justice
(dissenting).
This is another of a series of cases where the majority of the Workers’ Compensation Court of Appeals rejects the report of an attending physician and adopts the views of an expert, hired by the employee’s lawyer for purposes of litigation, who first examined the employee a year and four months after she permanently left her job.
It is undisputed this employee’s initial back problem was a degenerative narrowing of the disc space in the lower spine and she suffered from a combination of disabilities unrelated to her work. She was in 1975 58 years of age, 5-foot-3V2 inches in height, and weighed approximately 200 pounds. She suffered from diabetes, hypertension, a nervous condition, and degenerative joint disease in the knees. The sum total of her testimony of trauma was that in April 1975 while sitting at a sedentary job, assembling electrical switch terminals for windshield wipers, she “thought [she] felt a little catch,” in her low back while changing positions, and suffered severe pain which persisted for several days until she was hospitalized. She testified that throughout the several months on that particular assembly job she “did notice a little pain” intermittently which gradually worsened.
Dr. Stephen Haug, an orthopedist, attended Mrs. Holliday as a consultant in June and July 1975 and found she had “degenerative arthritis of the lower lumbo-sacral spine” and “essentially a chronic back strain” as a result. He found no evidence of any neurological impairment or disc problem other than the degenerative changes. While he agreed that prolonged sitting was bad for her back, he felt she was able to work and hopefully her employer could give her a different type of job. She was encouraged to lose weight, and to use Salicylates, and discharged from his care.
The doctor who examined Mrs. Holliday for the employer in May 1976 and March 1977 agreed that she had degenerative disc disease and found no evidence of a bulging or protruding disc which would be entirely different. He attributed the major problem in her disability to her weight.
Even the physician retained by her lawyer found no evidence of nerve root compression, agreed she had degenerative changes in the lower spine, and believed “her difficulties are mainly from a weakened and unstable and painful disc structure” which he termed a “protruded disc.” Yet he is the only physician who testified that her “symptoms and findings of a lumbar disc syndrome” were related to the work she performed in April 1975. He admitted his opinion was based on a job description which omitted any evidence of the force, rapidity, spinal movement, body position, or weight of the objects which her job entailed, and that he assumed it “required the use of her arms in a repetitive manner at some time during an eight-hour day.”
Although all of the doctors agree she could try to return to work, she has not since May 1975 sought any further employ*542ment, and continues to receive temporary total disability benefits indefinitely.
Judge Pomush in his dissent equated these facts with those in Fisher v. Red & White Taxi Co. 270 Minn. 317, 133 N.W.2d 543 (1965), where the compensation court had held that a ruptured disc experienced without trauma while pursuing sedentary employment as a cab driver was not proved to be caused by the employment any more than by daily living. The compensation court in the Fisher case distinguished Gillette v. Harold, Inc. 257 Minn. 313, 101 N.W.2d 200 (1960) on the ground that it involved more than a condition of the body which merely became symptomatic while the employee was working. I agree with the construction of Judge Pomush that there is nothing in the employee’s history that can reasonably be said to constitute a personal injury which caused employee’s present condition and justifies continuing temporary total disability benefits.
I adhere to the view that even in workers’ compensation cases the employee has the burden of proving by a fair preponderance of the evidence that her employment caused a disability she would not otherwise have experienced; and that the compensation court has the duty of scrutinizing the evidence with a view to arriving at a detached judicial assessment of the credibility of witnesses.1
In my opinion we have an obligation to require the compensation court to adhere strictly to these principles as long as we continue to have the responsibility for reviewing their decisions. We are a court of last resort and to do otherwise than insist on a uniform application of these rules is to demean the whole judicial process.
I would reverse.
PETERSON, Justice. I join in the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Otis.
ROGOSHESKE, Justice. I join in the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Otis.

. See, Mansfield v. Gopher Aviation Co., 301 Minn. 36, 221 N.E.2d 135 (1974).