I am due to represent a young woman with Myotonic Dystrophy. She was getting HRC & HRM but this was reduced to indef LRC on renewal.

If any one knows of any good caselaw or has represented a case with MD, your advice would be HUGELY appreciated.

TAS1 returned, just waiting for the date.

Thanks
Jo

As I and many others on this thread have said, diagnosis is essentially irrelevant to disability. No two people with the same condition have identical levels of disability, even if they have similar symptoms.

The way forward is to find strong evidence to corroborate the claimed level of disability. Doctors may know (but often do not), though they may well be able to state with confidence that something cannot be true in this case if they know the patient well. In a disorder like this, the consultant (?a neurologist, I guess?) may know more than the GP.

Physiotherapists and occupational therapists are likely to know a lot more, as are friends and relatives. And the best possible evidence is from your client, truthfully describing, in person, what her life is like.

Let me put it this way. If you x-ray the spine of every perosn over 50 in this country, every single one of them would show significant degenerative changes, and loss of disk height (what doctors usually and unhelpfully seem to describe as "crumbling"). And the level of disability - if any - found among them would bear no relationship at all to the extent of the changes.

There's quite a bit of caselaw about the need for decision makers to consider the medical evidence that led to a previous award being made, if a decision is being taken to reduce or remove a DLA award. For example, R(A)1/89 held that where there is a renewal claim the decision maker should look at the medical evidence in the previous claim. And R(M)1/96 places a duty on tribunals to make the reasons for its decision understandable in cases where their decision is less generous than a previous award.

"..if the reason for differing from the previous decision does not appear or cannot be inferred with reasonable clarity from the tribunal's record, it will normally follow in my view that they will be…in error of law."

Given the fact the Myotonic Dystrophy is, as I understand it, a condition that doesn't "get better" and is mainly manageable by the medical profession at best, there might be some mileage in pushing for reasons about the comparative medical reports used for the respective decisions.

Thank you, I needed that caselaw info!

The client only sees her GP who wrote a useless report but have received some good info from the MD support group.

Thanks once again.