Court Opinion

ID: 9732894
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 16:42:17.959884+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:26:55.045148
License: Public Domain

*117Clinton, J.,
dissenting.
I dissent respectfully.
Under the provisions of the statute, section 48-151, R. R. S. 1943, the plaintiff must prove by the preponderance of the evidence that he suffered an “injury,” which means “only violence to the physical structure of the body and such disease * * * as naturally results therefrom.” The terms shall not be construed “to include disability * * * due to natural causes but occurring while the employee is at work, nor to mean an injury, disability * * * that is the result of a natural progression of any preexisting condition.” (Emphasis supplied.)
. In this case it seems clear that the injury must necessarily be the coronary infarction. The majority opinion fairly sets forth the medical evidence, which summarized amounts to this: The initial treating doctor’s diagnosis was that claimant did not have an occlusion or infarction on the day of the claimed accident. The treating specialist gave as his opinion that the exertions on the day of the incident lead gradually to the infarction. The nontreating expert gave as his opinion that claimant suffered no infarction on the day alleged and the tenor of his testimony is that an occlusion does not result from external physical effort and in this case there was a natural progression of existing disease. Pain such as the claimant described on the day of the incident may be angina pectoris of effort. There was evidence he had symptoms prior to the day in question. It does not seem to me all this constitutes proof by a preponderance of evidence of an injury “in fact caused by the employment.”
Under the statute as amended in 1963 the requirement that the injury be caused by accident was eliminated. This eliminated the accident or the substituted “unusual exertion” requirement which used to exist in some cases. Now in heart cases we talk about a concept of “exertion greater than that of ordinary nonemployment life,” which seems to be the equivalent of the *118old. “unusual exertion” concept which is no longer required, and substitute it as proof of “injury.”
The majority opinion comes perilously close to making the employer an insurer in any case where symptoms, such as claimant suffered here, coincide with the exertions of his employment greater than his nonemployment life and disability ultimately occurs. See Beck v. State, 184 Neb. 477, 168 N. W. 2d 532.
I agree that the doctors must say whether the exertion has in fact caused the heart attack, the infarction, “the injury.” The conflict of the experts, including that of the original treating doctor, is such that it cannot be said that the claimant has proved that his injury was “in fact caused by the employment.” There is no question of credibility of the expert witnesses in this case. What we are called upon to do is solely to judge the expertise of the experts. When we have to do that alone there is no proof by a preponderance of the evidence. Where as here the two specialists testified by deposition, the judgment gets down to measuring the length of the respective pedigrees.
The adoption of pragmatic rules such as exertion greater than that of ordinary nonemployment life in order to obviate the problems of medical proof in cases such as this leads, it seems to me, to further complications. In some cases at least we will be called upon to go into the matter of proof of the exertions of nonemployment life in order to make the necessary comparisons. We already have a pragmatic rule, that is burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence, given us by the provisions of section 48-151, R. R. S. 1943, and that I believe is sufficient.
White, C. J., and Newton, J., join in this dissent.