Legal Question in Workers Comp in California

If your treating doctor is willing to place you on TTD(Total Temporary Disability), then your employer worker's compensation carrier has to pay you benefits. The also have to cover your treatment and offer you a settlement for any permanent disability you sustained. If your treating doctor is not willing to put you on disability benefits, you need to change your doctor and apply for state disability benefits (SDI). Feel free to call me at 213-388-7070 for a free consultation.

There's sometime VERY wrong in your story. Your 'Family" doctor MUST refuse to treat an work injury when you make clear the back pain is from a work injury... IF a 'family' doctor gave you remedies from October to January, I truly hope you paid cash.

Each time a 'family' doctor sees a patient and send a bill to insurance, the bill states the injury was NOT WORK RELATED, because private insurance specifically does not cover work injuries.

Most employers / insurers have Medical Provider Networks, a list of doctors to see workers injured on the job. IF you did make clear the problem was the result of the job, you would have been given a Workers Compensation Claim Form and been sent to a clinic selected by your employer and received lots of letters from a Work Comp Insurance Company... and your story contains none of these facts.

So it sounds like the employer placed you on unpaid leave because it's treating this like a non-industrial personal injury so far.

You need to get the claim form delivered and prove it was delivered to the employer; I use a fax machine and get a fax transmission report so you have a form showing the form made it to the employer; the sooner the comp insurer gets the claim form and the off work order, the sooner you are more likely to get paid.

Trouble is, the comp insurer does not have to pay anything based on the order from a personal doctor. The workers comp judge cannot order payments based on a personal doctor note, so an adjuster will pay nothing based on a personal doctor note.

HERE'S the link to the Workers Compensation Claim Form: http://www.dir.ca.gov/dwc/DWCForm1.pdf

Complete it (its only 8 lines, add EVERY BODY PART not just your back, because if you try to add your hips or your leg or your groin later, it will be refused and denied and delay healing another year), and FAX IT to the employer's fax, SAVE THE FAX TRANSMISSION REPORT... as it sounds like this employer is going to deny receiving any report of a work-related injury.

Just FYI: telling a supervisor "My back is killing me, this work is making it worse" is NOT REPORTING A WORK INJURY. You need to demand the claim form and you need to demand to see the workers comp physician for a condition caused by employment... it sounds like this employer is going to say you never did that.