Medico Legal

Almost every rejected medical letter was truthful. That is what makes the pattern worth understanding. Letters rarely fail because a doctor wrote something untrue. They fail because the document did not do the job the reader needed doing, and the reader had no safe option but to set it aside. Across benefits, housing, immigration and […]

Medical evidence in criminal proceedings is usually discussed in terms of fitness to plead or sentencing. There is a quieter point where a psychological letter changes someone’s daily life far more directly, and it is barely discussed at all: bail conditions, and curfews in particular. The following describes a pattern seen across several cases, with

The mistake in most housing medical letters is that they describe a person. A housing assessor is deciding something narrower: whether this person’s health is made worse by this property, and whether moving would improve it. A letter that never mentions the property has answered a question nobody asked. What a council is actually deciding

A disability supporting letter is read by someone who is not a doctor, deciding something that is not a medical question. Once you hold that thought, most of what makes these letters succeed or fail becomes obvious. The reader does not need to be told what your condition is called. They need to be told

Most immigration medical letters fail for the same reason. They confirm that a person is unwell, and stop there. The Home Office already accepts that people who come to it are often unwell. What it does not have, and what a letter has to supply, is a doctor’s structured opinion on the question actually in