Get Your VA Disability Claim Approved Faster with the Disability Benefits Questionnaire (DBQ)

When it comes to your VA claim, there's one VA disability form that's the most important and that you need to be aware of, and this is the Disability Benefits Questionnaire. So what makes the Disability Benefits Questionnaire the most important VA disability form? This is the form that is going to determine your rating, how high your rating's going to be. So what is a Disability Benefits Questionnaire? So there's two types of Disability Benefits Questionnaires. There's an internal use one. This is used by C&P examiners. When the VA orders a C&P exam for you, one of these DBQs will be filled out, and then there's public use Disability Benefits Questionnaires, and these are for you to go get filled out before you file your claim by your doctor. There's two sides of the story going on here. The VA is not looking out for you, right? You wouldn't even be watching this video if everything was hunky-dory with your rating and the VA, right? So this is one of the tricks that they do. So they send you to a C&P exam. Oh yeah, we got you all taken care of. We'll give you a fair shake. Claim denied. So in order to prevent that, you need to have your own doctor fill out a DBQ with a current diagnosis, current symptoms, and a nexus. So if the VA pulls that on you, you have an appeal on your hands that you can easily win in a higher-level review. These things have been around for about 12 years now. I think they started in 2010. It's literally just check boxes. So take it to your doctor. I'm gonna put a link in the description and flash it on the screen here a little bit. Has all the rateable conditions buried in these forms. You can fill it out, take it to your doctor, have him sign it, or have him fill it out and sign it. Either way, it needs to be signed by a qualified medical professional. If you do not have one of those, or your doctor won't fill one of these out for you, or your VA doctor or private doctor doesn't wanna do this for you, check out my med team. They can help you with a DBQ. There's a email address in the description. When you file your claim, you need to have your best interest and your side of the story represented. That's what a disability benefits questionnaire does. You submit your side of the story, file your claim, right? They're gonna send you to a C&P exam, get their side of the story. It's literally a CYA. In case you don't like the decision on your claim, they'll be like, yeah, we sent you to a C&P exam, man. Sorry, come back, Craig. You're out of luck, man. You didn't submit one. So all we have is ours, by our guy that we paid for. So that's what the disability benefits questionnaire is all about. And that's why I think it's the most important VA disability form that you need to be aware of. Get a disability benefits questionnaire filled out by a private doctor. You can do whatever you want, but if you wanna win your VA claim, you wanna bring the right kind of medical evidence forward, the right amount, and then keep your mouth shut and don't say a bunch of extra stuff and submit long-winded personal statements and stuff like that. Current diagnosis, current symptoms, and a nexus, and make sure you go about establishing service connection the right way. Most of the time, it's a direct service connection claim or a secondary service connection claim. If you don't know the difference, you should probably start there. If you've been out longer than a year, you wanna go the secondary route. You wanna follow claims and attach them to things that are already service-connected. Lots of things are logical. The body's all interconnected, but this is why you need a disability benefits questionnaire. The doctor needs to explain why your erectile dysfunction is caused by the meds that you take for your service-connected combat PTSD, for example. If you just file a claim and hope they see that link, they're not going to find it, but they will send you to a C&P examiner who's also not going to find it. They're not looking for these service connections. You stick it in their face, they can't ignore it. They may try, they may disregard it, but you have something to appeal. You wanna stay out of the appeals process. It takes up more time. Get in, get out, file your claim, prove it, and win it. You're not gonna win all of them, and who knows how long these things are gonna take, but a claim takes six months to adjudicate. Then you get a decision. If you don't like the decision and you have to appeal it because you didn't show up with some medical evidence, like a DBQ, you just wasted another three, four, or five months. So this is front-loading the VA claim, basically. Give them everything they need to make a decision up front so you don't have to enter the appeals process. If you do a search for DBQ or disability benefits questionnaire, this is the site you're going to get. This is the VA website where they have the most updated forms. So as you look through here, it tells you their public disability benefit questionnaires. So there's public disability benefits questionnaires for us. That's why these are available, so we can use them. And then there's internal use disability benefits questionnaires, which are only filled out by examiners, C&P examiners. So these are here for a reason, for us to use them. So download the one you need and make sure you use it. So how do you find out what you need? Figure out what your condition is. You probably already have a diagnosis and a diagnostic code, right? Then we look through all the forms. So as we're scrolling down here, we have everything in cardiovascular, dental and oral, dermatological, endocrine system, ear, nose, throat, gastrointestinal, janitory, gynecological, however you say that, infectious diseases, musculoskeletal, neurological, on and on. Here's your mental health ones under psychological. So there's quite a few different disability benefits questionnaires, and they definitely combine DBQs or conditions in DBQs. So if it's for foot, it's for everything that they rate for the foot. So open these things up, PDF reader, it's pretty easy. You could do searches to find out what DBQ you need. Let me show you what one of these things looks like. This is the mental health DBQ. This is what you need to do to check it out and get it filled out what you need to know. So we pop this thing open, mental disorders. Some of the things you need to know on here, it'll say what the DBQ is. You wanna make sure you get the right DBQ for sure. And all of these DBQs have dates at the bottom of each page. So it'll say what data was released. This one was released on January, 2022, and it was updated on April, 2020. It's about the time they removed them from their website. So these will give you the most current disability benefits questionnaire when you go to the VA website. And it's a series of check boxes. What are the symptoms? Check, he's got that, he's got that, he's got that. And your doctor needs to sign off on this. When you go for a mental health exam of any kind, depression, anxiety, PTSD, they're all mental health things. When you go there, this is what the C&P examiner's doing. He may be jerking off and not paying attention to you, or it may not seem like it, but what he is doing, look at what he's doing on his computer. He's going click, click, check. This is what he's filling out. He's doing it online. And when you leave, this thing's off and running to the VA. It'd be nice if we got our DBQs sooner or at all. You have to FOIA request them. And by the way, look at your previous decisions. If you haven't taken a look at your VA claims file, get it. FOIA request your VA claims file, get it on a CD, and you can look at all your past rating decisions. And you're gonna see an internal use DBQ on every single one of them, if you went to a C&P exam. So moving on through here, this one's probably five pages. And this is probably one of the more important parts down here, the examiner's certificate and signature. You need to have their credentials. This is the power of the pen here. You could fill this out, but your doctor needs to sign it. And you know, he needs to put his NPI number and that kind of stuff, because they check this. Let me jump in here real quick and tell you about my bootcamp. If you want to learn more about the VA claims process, check out my bootcamp. You can talk to me live. There's a link on the website and in the description, combatcraig.com. And also, if you need medical evidence, like a nexus, or documenting your symptoms properly, go to our website, combatcraig.com, and it says medteam slash nexus letters. Click on that link, fill out the form, boom, you're done.