Dr. Devesh Singh:

It is a challenging question. It is not unusual to come across an occasional situation where it is not very clear what the medical condition is. To be honest, the diagnosis is not what we award our benefits or schemes for; it is how the condition affects the person. Irrespective of the diagnosis, if there is information that somebody is affected to the degree that meets the qualifying criteria for whatever scheme is applied for, that application should be processed without undue delay.

Sometimes this arises in occupational injury benefit applications. This is the payment you get from an accidental injury at work. In these cases, there is more of a requirement to have the exact details of the injury or illness, and whether it was contracted from employment alone or outside employment. In those cases, you can have various specialists giving different views. I remember the case of someone with an allergy involving LED light. This is not a known diagnostic condition but it was affecting her. It was a challenging case but we based the award on how the person was affected in terms of headaches, ringing in the ears and lack of concentration and focus, irrespective of diagnosis. They will get to it at some stage. Does that help to address the question?