Florida: Heart-Lung Presumption Successfully Rebutted in Corrections Officer Claim

A Florida judge of compensation claims improperly credited the testimony offered by an expert medical advisor (EMA) where the physician based his opinion on an assumption that a correctional officer suffered a heart attack after several years of working in the stressful occupation—the officer had only worked three months and had a host of non-employment factors that lead to the attack, according to other expert medical testimony offered by the employer. The Court also found that the EMA had improperly bolstered his opinion by relying upon scholarly epidemiological articles written by another physician instead of the EMA’s own examination, during which the EMA acknowledged that the officer had multiple co-morbid conditions that could have contributed to the heart attack.

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 Department of Corr. v. Junod, 2017 Fla. App. LEXIS 5231 (Apr. 13, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 52.07.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see