Law Commons^™

Pain Is Enough: Chronic Pain As Disability, Katherine L. Moore

Buffalo Law Review

States have historically failed to recognize chronic pain as a disability. In medicine, chronic pain has gained increasing recognition as a disability in and of itself, even absent a current, medically determinable physical impairment. The law, however, has been slow to catch up. This Article argues that chronic pain is a disability, even without medical evidence of an underlying impairment, because of pain’s significant functional impact on the body and mind. In the 2018 case of Saunders v. Wilkie, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recognized that “pain is enough” for a veteran to be …