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A Little VA Disability Claim Trick
***NOTE*** There is nothing illegal or unethical about this trick. All Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on any report for any veteran is redacted. This trick simply gives you a little insight to how the VA looks at any particular disability.
Alright, follow along with me while I explain to you a little trick that might help you with your VA disability claims. What I’m about to show you is not illegal and the data is publicly available and searchable using Google, this is just a data mining trick.
The VA posts all of the results of their Board of Veterans’ Appeals cases. This means, that you can look online to see what the VA decided for a particular disability claim.
If you are looking to see what the Veterans Administration (VA) has done with other claims for the same medical condition that you may have, then you can pull up and see the findings from the decision boards.
Let’s say that you want to see decision board results for “fibromyalgia”. First, we are going to assemble our query for Google to search on.
site:https://www.va.gov/
“site” is telling Google that you want to search a particular website, in our case, we want to search https://www.va.gov and specifically in the vetapp## folder.
Replace the two-pound signs with the last two digits of the year you want to review, we will use 2022, so we will put in 22, so it will look like the following:
site:https://www.va.gov/
Now we want to add in the medical condition that you want to review, and we will use “Fibromyalgia” so our finished query will look like the following:
site:https://www.va.gov/
This means that we are searching the VA’s website in the vetapp22 folder for anything that has the word “Fibromyalgia” in it.
Now, hop over to Google.com and enter the following URL construct.
site:https://www.va.gov/
If you copy and paste that into our web browser and hit enter and should instantly get results showing us dozens if not hundreds of VA decision board results from 2022 for Fibromyalgia. I found it very useful to see what they had to say about Fibromyalgia and what if anything seemed to be the golden ticket. I did find a few nuggets using this method.
Your results may vary, but I really hope it works for you, and good luck on your claim(s).
