Iowa: Injured Worker Fails to Show Her Injury Resulted in Injury to Body as a Whole

Where a bartender sustained an injury when she slipped and “did the splits” while working at her employer’s bar, the commissioner’s decision that the bartender sustained a scheduled injury to her leg, and not an injury to her body as a whole, was supported by substantial evidence. The Iowa appellate court stressed its task “is not to determine whether the evidence supports a different finding; rather, our task is to determine whether” there is substantial evidence supporting the findings the commissioner actually made. One of the physicians specifically found that there was no indication that the injury extended beyond the bartender’s leg. While she had some damage to the sciatic nerve, it was limited to the section of the lateral upper hamstring—part of the bartender’s leg.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Janssen v. Merry Lanes, 2016 Iowa App. LEXIS 960 (Sept. 14, 2016)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 87.03.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law