A pain pump, a stimulator trial, and one doctor's opinion the board would not let go of
A 22-year back injury keeps costing one employer – and Oregon's appeals court just said it has to keep paying.
On May 13, 2026, the Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed that staffing firm InteliStaf Healthcare must continue covering pain treatment for a worker more than two decades after she hurt her back on the job.
The case is the kind of long-tail workers' compensation fight HR and risk managers know well: a worker injured years ago, ongoing treatment, and an employer arguing the link to the original injury has worn thin.
Julie Daniels first hurt her lower back in May 1996 while working for a previous employer. She had surgery, recovered, and returned to work without symptoms. In March 2004, while working for InteliStaf, she injured her lower back again. That claim was accepted for a lumbar strain and an annular tear at the L3-4 disc.
By September 2005, Daniels was seeing Dr. Morgan, a pain management specialist. She has been under Morgan's care ever since.
The dispute centered on treatment from June 2019 through September 2020 – mostly visits to refill Daniels's intrathecal pain pump – and a proposed trial of a spinal cord stimulator called Nevro. InteliStaf refused to authorize the stimulator and declined to pay for the 2019-2020 visits, contending the treatments were not causally related to the 2004 injury and were excessive, inappropriate, and ineffectual.
The company's case rested...
Pakistani actress and model Ayesha Omar has strongly denied a controversial statement falsely attributed to her on social media. In recent days, a statement circulated online claiming that the act...