New developments in expert opinions

Background. Precedent setting decisions by the Federal Social Court from 2005 and 2006 are still not completely followed everywhere in the practice of assessment of occupational accidents. Accident. The legal term accident is not completely compatible with the commonly used parlance and also not with the medical scientific view of "an accident is present if an internal cause cannot be found". Pre-existing damage. If constitutional alterations or degenerative disease disorders must be taken into consideration in addition to the accident, a strict separation must be made between predisposal to damage (clinically silent pre-existing damage) and pre-existing diseases (clinically manifest pre-existing damage). An accident can only exacerbate a pre-existing disease but not a predisposed damage. Causality testing. This is carried in two stages. In the first step the direction and intensity of external violence must be questioned. If the violence was theoretically capable of damaging healthy tissue in the same manner then pre-existing damage becomes insignificant; the accident is legally essential and the reverse conclusion is impossible. The second step in causality testing is a detailed analysis of the findings presenting as facts under the aspect whether and to what extent each individual fact is indicative for or against the causality. A result should be expected as the conclusion in the mental form of a pair of scales.