Andrew Kinney, a Social Security attorney with Hoglund, Chwialkowski & Mrozik, PLLC in Minnesota, explains the top five ways to get approved for Social Security benefits. In a typical year, Mr. Kinney does between four and five hundred hearings. In those hearings, he sees patterns of ways people get approved and patterns of ways that people get denied. His firm’s website is available at: http://hoglundlaw.com/

Here are the five top ways to get approved for Social Security benefits.

One: Get an attorney. If you have an attorney, the attorney is trained in law, and the attorney can argue before the hearing in legal arguments and briefs, during the hearing with the judge who’s also an attorney, and also after the hearing, in terms of legal arguments. During the hearing as well, there are experts that your attorney can crossexamine. So if you want an attorney, you need to make sure to hire a law firm because only lawyers and law firms can give legal advice.

Two: Make sure to treat for your medical conditions. If you have a medical problem but don’t get care for it, it’s hard to prove at a hearing with the medical records we have, what’s wrong. Especially if you decide perhaps there’s nothing that can be done. So if you have a medical problem for which perhaps no surgery is possible right now, be sure to still treat from time to time for it. Make sure your doctor knows how it’s progressing, because we need to prove what’s wrong, and to prove what’s wrong leads us to prove why you can’t work fulltime for a medical reason. That’s the legal standard of disability.

Three: Always take your medications. When someone is prescribed medications, such as a diabetic, it seems clear enough why someone needs to take the insulin. But there are also other medications for other conditions, such as depression, where medications can have some positive effect or maybe not as well have a positive effect. What is important is that if your doctor prescribed you medications is that you take your medications and if there’s a side effect make sure to talk with your doctor about it. Because one thing Social Security looks at is they determine whether you’re doing your best to get better.

Four: Treat chemical dependency. If you have difficulty with alcohol or illegal drugs or prescribed pain medications for example, try to get help for that early on. Certainly it’s not healthy for you to have those difficulties, and in the clients that I help, that arises from time to time. For example, if someone has chronic depression or anxiety, and they also take illegal drugs, one of the problems over time is that the judges look at the treatment and decide, and legitimately so, that the medications you’re taking don’t work because they’re offset by your drug addiction. So if you have a medical problem such as a drug addiction, talk to your doctor about it, be up front about it and try to attack it because that can cloud the judge’s ability to see underneath that problem as to what you’re actually disabled for.

Five: Try to get a statement from your treating doctor. And when I say statement it isn’t very effective if your treating doctor writes a letter and says, “I know Joe and he’s disabled.” What I’m talking about is something along the lines of what we do at Hoglund Law Offices. We have forms that lay out functional limitations that people have. And we ask a doctor, “What are the treating problems? How many days might they miss a month? What sort of hourlies, hourly work can they do where they work eight hours a day? Can they sit, stoop, walk, stand? From a mood point of view, can they concentrate, can they handle stress?” Things like that. We’re taking the doctor’s diagnoses and treatment, and justification for the diagnoses and treatment, and we’re taking it one step further. We’re having your treating doctor essentially come into the hearing room by form of this paper and testify what you are limited in doing. That does not guarantee an approval, but it definitely helps, for my clients, be able to get approved.

So those are the top five ways to try to get approved for Social Security benefits.

If you wish to hire our law firm, you can feel free to go to hoglundlaw.com. Our information is there.