If you are a veteran that suffers from periodic moments of hearing loss, ear pressure, dizziness, and nausea, you might need to talk to a VA disability lawyer about benefits for Meniere’s Disease. It’s a combination of all of those symptoms that classify it as Meniere’s. It’s worth calling us to talk about your symptoms to see if you have a valid case.
In this article about Meniere’s Disease and VA disability ratings:
- What are the VA Ratings for Meniere’s Syndrome?
- What Symptoms Matter For Meniere’s Syndrome VA Rating?
- How To Get 100% TDIU for Meniere’s Disease
- If the VA Denied Your Application for Meniere’s Disease
- Getting Social Security Disability vs. VA Disability for Vestibular Disorders
- How Meniere’s Progresses Over the Long Term
- What Causes Meneire’s Disease?
- How a Cerebellar Gait Can Help Prove Your Meniere’s Disease
- Get a Permanent and Total Rating for Meniere’s
What are the VA Ratings for Meniere’s Syndrome?
The ratings for Meniere’s syndrome only fall into 3 levels: 100%, 60%, and 30%. Like many VA disability ratings, the frequency of the symptoms has a big factor in how high of a rating you can get. That’s why we always say to keep a journal or at least a list on your refrigerator to note how often you have the symptoms, how severe they are, and what effect they have on your day-to-day life.
- Hearing impairment and vertigo at the same time less than once a month is worth a 30% rating. It doesn’t matter if you have tinnitus or not.
- The same things, hearing impairment and vertigo, but also with cerebellar gait, will get your rating up to 60%. Tinnitus is still not a contributing factor to the rating.
- 100% VA rating for Meniere’s syndrome happens with all of these symptoms, vertigo, hearing impairment, and abnormal gait, more than once a week.
What Symptoms Matter For Meniere’s Syndrome VA Rating?
Tinnitus is helpful in diagnosing Meniere’s disease, but it is not a factor in the rating. For all three rating levels, it is explicitly stated “with or without tinnitus.” If you can’t get rated for Meniere’s disease, you can try to get a rating for tinnitus separately. That may actually help you get a higher monthly compensation if your tinnitus and other ear disabilities combine to be greater than you would get from 30% Meniere’s disease.
Nausea also does not matter specifically for Meniere’s. Some people get vertigo so bad that they have motion sickness, nausea, and vomiting. Other’s find relief only in lying down wherever they are, even on the ground in public places.
That level of vertigo is important to note, but it won’t get you a higher rating for Meniere’s. Vertigo is enough like Meniere’s that it is VA diagnostic code 6204 and Meniere’s is 6205. Since the highest rating you can get for vertigo alone is 30%, it really is better to prove the full diagnosis of Meniere’s instead of just stopping with vertigo.
How To Get 100% TDIU for Meniere’s Disease
The key way to get 100% TDIU for Meniere’s disease is to prove that it affects your ability to work 100%. You can especially prove that you can’t even have a sedentary job when you have Meniere’s. Many other vets have won their claims by showing the frequency and severity of their attacks.
The VA doesn’t usually give 100% TDIU for just a single disability. They typically add up disabilities and veterans meet the criteria like this:
1. You have at least 1 service-connected disability rated at 60% or more disabling, or 2 or more service-connected disabilities—with at least 1 rated at 40% or more disabling and a combined rating of 70% or more—and
Taken from https://www.va.gov/disability/eligibility/special-claims/unemployability/
2. You can’t hold down a steady job that supports you financially (known as substantially gainful employment) because of your service-connected disability. Odd jobs (marginal employment), don’t count.
- Hearing loss causes you to be unable to talk to customers or co-workers.
- Hearing loss can create an unsafe work environment if you are in a dangerous setting.
- Extreme vertigo can make it unsafe for you to drive a vehicle or operate machinery.
- Nausea and vomiting can keep you up at night, so that you can’t get enough sleep to stay awake at work.
- Headaches and ear pressure can have an effect on your mood and mental health, not to mention tinnitus and hearing loss. These can all make you a terrible person to work with! (it sounds unkind, but if it’s true, the VA wants to hear about it)
If the VA Denied Your Application for Meniere’s Disease
We work with you to get the highest claim you can get. Sometimes the symptoms of Meniere’s disease add up differently. For example, if you can’t prove Meniere’s, you might get one VA disability rating for vertigo, another for tinnitus, and another for hearing loss.
The best case scenario for these disabilities combines like this:
- 30% is the highest rating you can get for vertigo or dizziness
- 10% is the highest rating you can get for tinnitus
- 50% is the highest you can get for migraine headaches
Those ratings combine with VA math up to 68%, which is then rounded up to a 70% combined VA disability rating. (You can learn more about the logic behind VA math here.) That is about $1,716.28 per month if you have no dependents according to the current VA Rating Schedule. That is more than yo could ever get with the highest Meniere’s rating of 50%. Even if you were diagnosed with the worst case of Meniere’s, if you could get those three ratings, the VA would have to give you that 70% instead of the 50%. They are required by law to give you the highest available rating.
Getting Social Security Disability vs. VA Disability for Vestibular Disorders
The VA decides its disability claims very differently than the Social Security Administration. While SSD is decided on a yes or no basis, VA disability is on a rating scale based on how much of your income can you not earn because of your disability. If you’ve already qualified for SSD, that can help…
- If you are approved for SSD for Meniere’s, much of your same paperwork can be used for your VA application
- If you can’t service-connect your Meniere’s diagnosis for VA benefits, you might be able to service-connect one or two of the individual symptoms, like fullness in the ear, vertigo, or hearing loss
- If your diagnosis isn’t bad enough for the VA, start your application process anyway. There is no cure for Meniere’s and the syndrome progresses with age, unfortunately.
How Meniere’s Progresses Over the Long Term
There is no cure for Meniere’s Disease so doctors work to treat your symptoms as they increase. There are large communities online of people that live and function with Meniere’s and they freely share advice like avoiding sodium, listening to white noise, and losing weight to control the symptoms. Meniere’s is also called endolymphatic hydrops in some groups, so you can search for that too.
Here is how it advances.
It may begin with an increase of ringing in the ears. It might even be constant. There is a feeling of fullness in your ear (it typically doesn’t affect both ears at the same time) and occasional dizziness.
As it progresses, you’ll have more attacks of vertigo and hearing loss. After your dizzy spell, you might feel like you’re in an old V-8 commercial where they walked around at an angle. Your equilibrium will be a little off so be careful that you don’t fall.
In the strongest stages of Meniere’s Disease, all of the middle ear problems are more frequent and stronger. You might even suffer what is called a Tumarkin’s otolithic crisis — or a drop attack. This is the sudden feeling that you’re being flipped out of nowhere. Your body reacts and often just collapses, but sometimes jumps or twitches uncontrollably. You don’t lose consciousness or pass out, you just collapse for no reason. Recovery is often pretty quick, but the adrenaline and embarrassment can upset you for a while.
You can see that Meniere’s disease, as it advances, should be a VA-ratable disability. The impact on a veteran’s balance and hearing alone is enough to make it hard to work.
As with all of your disability symptoms, a complete notebook recording each event will help detail your case to the VA doctors.
What Causes Meneire’s Disease?
Doctors don’t know the initial cause of Meneire’s, which can make it difficult to find a good service connection. At the same time, because of the range of theories about its cause, you might be able to prove your symptoms and one of these events to prove your service connection.
- Viral infections
- Auto-immune conditions
- Swollen blood vessels
- High blood pressure
- Physical injury to the vestibular nerves
Whatever the cause, an increase of fluid in the middle ear is the main detectable problem when you have an attack. It is hard to catch this in a doctor’s office, but an MRI or other testing may show that you have had an attack in the past.
How a Cerebellar Gait Can Help Prove Your Meniere’s Disease
A Cerebellar Gait is when your right foot doesn’t work in symmetry with your left foot. One leg might not lift up as high, or take as long of a step, as the other one. This happens because as one ear is balancing level, your other ear is thinking that you are tilted sideways. This is where vertigo and dizziness come in.
Several veterans have been granted 60% or 100% disability because of the way they were unable to walk without stumbling. Imagine the feeling you have after spending a day on a little boat, in a car, or on an airplane. That feeling that you are still rocking or moving can come upon a person with Meniere’s Syndrome at any moment.
While driving a fork truck,
While operating a lathe,
While answering the phone at a welcome desk.
An altered gait can also work its way into your knees, back, and spine problems. This all shows that if you think you have Meniere’s disease from your time in the service, you should apply for VA benefits as soon as possible. If you develop knee and spine problems, they can all be secondary connections to your Meniere’s disease rating.
Get a Permanent and Total Rating for Meniere’s
Because there is no known cure for Meniere’s and because it progresses into worse and worse conditions, we will try to get a permanent and total rating for your disease. P&T ratings are typically reserved for things that are chronic (they will never go away) or terminal (the condition is going to kill you). Even with all of the falls and nausea, people don’t typically die of Meniere’s disease.
Since Meniere’s is something that will affect your work for the rest of your life, even if you can only get a 30% rating, it’s a start. The VA reviews all non-permanent ratings every 5 years or so. If you can get a 10% rating, you’ll be in better shape to get that increased to 30% or 100% in that next 5-year review. Every case is different, so talk to someone on our team to figure out what your best strategy will be.
No, you should start your application as soon as you can. Talk to one of our VA disability case managers who has experience with cases like this. They might have some helpful advice for your claim.
Depending on how high of a rating you can get from each of those vs. your Meniere’s disease rating, the VA is supposed to give you the highest rating. They are supposed to pick the one option that actually gives you more money per month.
Neil Woods
VA disability lawyer
Woods and Woods
VA Accreditation Number: 44739