Date: | 12/26/2000 |
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Organization: | Department of Industrial Accidents |
Docket Number: | DIA Board No. 33320-93 |
Location: | Boston |
- Employee: Theresa Canavan
- Employer: Brigham & Women's Hospital
- Self Insurer: Brigham & Women's Hospital
WILSON, J. The self-insurer appeals from a decision in which an administrative judge concluded that the employee, Theresa Canavan, suffered permanent and total incapacity as a result of more than thirty symptoms attributable to her employment at Brigham & Women’s Hospital.1 (Dec. 353-354, 350, 356.) After the judge’s decision awarding §34A benefits was filed, the Supreme Judicial Court reversed a different administrative judge’s earlier decision in favor of the employee. Canavan’s Case, 432 Mass. 304 (2000). In that reversed decision, the hearing judge had awarded §30 medical benefits and also denied the self-insurer’s request to discontinue temporary total incapacity benefits that it was paying for an accepted exposure-induced sinusitis, with a date of injury of August 6, 1993. Canavan at 306. The Canavan court held that the administrative judge abused his discretion when he allowed expert medical opinion evidence on the controversial diagnosis of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), a diagnosis without a qualifying foundation of scientific reliability under Commonwealth v. Lanigan, 419 Mass. 15 (1994). Canavan, supra at 314-315. We take note of the present judge’s determination in the instant decision that Ms. Canavan suffers not from MCS, but from “a combination of many or all of the more than thirty symptoms referenced by the employee and the doctors, and recorded by [the judge] in [the] decision.” (Dec. 350.) However, we conclude that the distinction carries no weight, in light of the Canavan court’s treatment of the issue.2 After a careful review of the entire record of this difficult case, we reverse the decision awarding §34A benefits.