Brandon Carter v. Seven Rivers Design Build, LLC

Summary

The Intermediate Court of Appeals of West Virginia affirmed the Workers’ Compensation Board of Review’s order granting Brandon Carter a 0% permanent partial disability award. The court held that the Board was not clearly wrong in finding the impairment evaluation supporting a higher award unreliable, particularly because it lacked documentation of objective mental-status testing. The court declined to resolve the separate issue concerning impairment ratings for medication use and noted that any potential psychiatric impairment had not yet been formally rated.

Holdings

1. The Board was not clearly wrong in finding that Carter failed to establish permanent impairment from the compensable injury, apart from a possible psychiatric impairment that had not yet been formally rated, and in affirming the 0% permanent partial disability award.
2. The court declined to decide the applicability of the impairment-guideline criteria concerning medication used to manage symptoms because the Board’s independent finding that Dr. Guberman’s mental-status impairment rating was unreliable was sufficient to resolve the appeal.

Questions Presented

1. Whether the Workers’ Compensation Board of Review was clearly wrong in affirming a 0% permanent partial disability award.
2. Whether the Board was required to accept Dr. Guberman’s 10% whole-person impairment assessment based on medication use and mental-status impairment.
3. Whether the court needed to decide the applicability of the impairment-guideline criteria concerning medication used to manage symptoms.

Disposition

affirmed