Category: The Rx Professor

Best estimates are that work comp accounts for 1-2% of overall healthcare costs in the US. We are close to a rounding error when compared to private health insurance (28-31%), Medicare (20-23%), Medicaid (18-20%), private pay (10%), and other government programs (5%) like the Veterans Administration, Tricare, and Indian Health Service. Although we're small in the big picture, broader healthcare trends almost always find their way into work comp eventually.…

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The term “new normal” has been used - some might say overused - since it became popular after the 2008 financial crisis. It was used then to reset expectations of growth from before the crisis to after the crisis. Since that time, it has become the pop-culture way to describe a permanent shift after a major event. The work comp industry has often used this phrase to describe what happens…

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Occasionally, you look up and realize something didn’t just progress. It shifted. That’s what happened over the past week. Two separate federal actions - one focused on psychedelics and the other on cannabis - may seem unrelated at first glance. Different substances. Different histories. Different levels of acceptance. But when you step back and look at them together, they tell a much bigger story. The landscape around “alternative” treatments for…

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On February 26, WorkCompCollege.com and Workplace Health hosted the first ever “WCMICS Live.” WCMICS is the “Workers’ Comp Mental Injury Claims Specialist” certification that WorkCompCollege.com launched in Fall 2025. I served as moderator for the all-day event and specifically designed it to be a hybrid learning experience. We watched short video excerpts from the WCMICS faculty together then paused to discuss, challenge assumptions, and apply what we heard to real-world…

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I had the privilege last week of being part of a panel, for the fifth year, at the California DWC educational conference in Oakland. This time it was two panels, both of which were focused on the use and implications of AI in workers’ compensation. While I have been a work comp “educator and agitator” (yes, the real tagline associated with my The RxProfessor brand) for over twenty years, much…

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That has been my description of the past several holidays. It always elicits an eyeroll from my wife with a corresponding “that doesn’t make sense” comment. Which, I agree, the phrase is somewhat nonsensical. The words “new” and “tradition” don’t usually fit within the same sentence. A tradition, in the traditional definition, is something that happens without much change more than once, whether it was intended to be recycled or…

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As I mentioned in Part 1, I was on a medical malpractice jury in June 2024. There were several things that I learned through that process that I think work comp stakeholders should consider on each individual claim. People put into unfamiliar circumstances are reliant on experts. Many of the medical terms used throughout the trial were foreign to everyone on the jury. Since we could not do any research…

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I had the privilege of being the foreperson on a medical malpractice trial in June 2024. Based on the expressions of most of the people during voir dire, “privilege” wasn’t the first word that was on their mind. Once selected, however, the countenance of the chosen changed dramatically. From the case summary we heard, the stakes were high. If the two defendants were found guilty, they would be financially burdened,…

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Everyone under the age of 80 probably recognizes the term FOMO – fear of missing out. This is a primary strategy of marketing, to make the potential consumer want to buy the product for fear of missing out on (fill in the blank). That underlying fear is what makes social media so compelling as connections post their vacation pictures or their new car or their wonderful family. FOMO isn’t inherently…

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According to AI, the human brain remembers negative things more than positive things due to: Emotional processing Survival Negative bias Evolutionary defense mechanism Vividness Heightened awareness This explains a very common comment as a new year arrives – “I’m sure glad that year is over with.” A lot can happen in 365 days (or 366 days in the case of 2024). Unless you keep a journal that documents the daily…

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