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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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to the testimony. It was really a very unfortunate situation. It's a horrid way to proceed.

I say all this to illustrate that the claimant is always at a disadvantage in the medical testimony because he doesn't have any doctor of his own. After he's been discharged from the care of the insurance company and they tell him that he's well, if he still continues not to feel well he decides to go to his own doctor, as they call him. His own doctor proves to be somebody who doctored his brother-in-law. He's always some kind of a nice, old, settled fellow out in the edges of Brooklyn or Queens, but not up on the latest notions of medical diagnosis - not a great diagnostician. He's a typical family physician who can take care of you when you're sick, who knows a fever when he sees it and probably gets people up and around as well as anybody else. But he's no diagnostician and has no great elaborate series of words that sound very impressive when they're read off.

They bring him in. “My doctor says I'm sick,” says the man and they bring in this old doctor. The doctor says, “I've been treating him and I think he's very sick. He has pains in his back. I've been doing this, that and the other. He has pains running down his legs. Certainly I think it comes from the accident.”





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