Smoking-Cancer-Workers Compensation Attorney in Minnetonka, Minnesota

Smoking-Cancer-Workers Compensation

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Obviously, smoking has been a huge issue and it’s come to the forefront with litigation and with study after study in the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. If you were a smoker and you end up with cancer, it makes the cancer case not more difficult, I would say, but the smoking is likely to be one of the causative factors of the cancer. So what happens, like a preexisting condition where somebody has a bad low back and they reinjure their low back, the smoking is taken into account as to how does that preexisting condition factor in the cancer? Even if there is some work-related exposure, the court has to weigh and balance what the work-related exposure is with the smoking. Being a smoker does not kibosh or destroy a claim, but it does have a factor.

The interesting part in the asbestos and mesothelioma cases is there are many studies out of the prominent medical doctors and the clinics that show that smoking can, in fact, enhance or accelerate the asbestosis, but since mesothelioma and asbestosis come directly from asbestos, the smoking is not a causative factor in either of those conditions. So in a way, unfortunately, I don’t like to use the word enhance, but it accelerates or enhances the condition, and that definitely is not a kibosh to the – to bringing the claim.

Minneapolis workers’ compensation attorney, Dean Salita, discusses if smokers can make a cancer-related workers’ compensation claim.

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