Crohn's Disease Disability Lawyer in Dallas, TX

Replacing the Paycheck Crohn's Took from You

A chronic GI disease can drain a household's savings faster than almost any other condition. We work to put monthly benefit checks and back pay in our clients' hands so families aren't forced to choose between rent and treatment.

Millions in Maximum Back Pay

Reversed a denial for a 55-year-old factory worker and recovered the full back pay he was owed.

$164 Million in Benefits Secured

Won SSI benefits and automatic Medicaid eligibility for a disabled Texas child.

300+ Appeals Won

Took a complicated SSDI appeal across the finish line for a 100%-rated disabled veteran.

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Can You Get Disability for Crohn's Disease

The short answer is yes, but a diagnosis by itself isn't enough. What the Social Security Administration (SSA) looks at is how much your disease interferes with your ability to hold down a job, and whether that interference is expected to last at least a year. Crohn's is a chronic, lifelong inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and severe cases routinely meet that threshold.

Our clients with Crohn's are often dealing with some combination of:

• Frequent, unpredictable flare-ups marked by cramping, severe diarrhea, and urgent restroom needs that no employer can realistically schedule around.
• Strictures, fistulas, and bowel obstructions that often require multiple surgeries and leave lasting damage.
• Repeat bowel resections that, over time, can lead to short bowel syndrome and ongoing absorption problems.
• Perianal complications — abscesses, fissures, and draining fistulas that make sitting through a workday genuinely impossible.
• Systemic effects beyond the gut, including inflammatory arthritis, eye inflammation, skin involvement, and liver issues.

What matters for a successful claim is showing that the disease is severe, well-documented, and not going away.

Proving Your Claim Under the SSA's Blue Book

The SSA publishes a reference manual (informally called the "Blue Book") that lists qualifying impairments and the medical evidence needed to prove them. Crohn's disease is evaluated under Listing 5.06 for Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

To match the listing, your records typically need to show one of the following within a six-month window:

• A documented intestinal obstruction caused by narrowing of the small intestine or colon, confirmed by imaging or surgery, that required hospitalization for decompression or surgical repair, occurring at least twice, with the events at least 60 days apart.
• Two or more of the following findings, each documented at least 60 days apart in the same six-month period: anemia (hemoglobin under 10.0 g/dL), low serum albumin, a tender abdominal mass with pain not relieved by prescription narcotics, perineal disease with a draining abscess or fistula, involuntary weight loss of 10% or more from baseline, or the need for daily supplemental nutrition through a feeding tube or central line.

To build that record, we pull together the kind of documentation that actually moves a case forward:

• Endoscopy and colonoscopy findings showing ulceration, strictures, granulomas, and the extent of disease throughout the GI tract.
• Cross-sectional imaging such as CT enterography or MR enterography that maps inflammation, fistulas, and bowel wall thickening.
• Lab panels confirming anemia, hypoalbuminemia, elevated CRP and ESR, low vitamin B12 or iron, and other markers of active disease.
• Operative reports from bowel resections, stricturoplasties, fistula repairs, abscess drainage, or ostomy placement.
• A complete treatment timeline showing your response, or lack of response, to biologics (Humira, Remicade, Stelara, Entyvio, Skyrizi), immunomodulators, and steroid courses.

Winning When Your Records Don't Quite Match the Listing

Plenty of Crohn's patients are genuinely disabled but don't perfectly check every box in Listing 5.06. That doesn't mean the case is over, but it does mean we shift to a different legal route: the medical-vocational allowance. Under that path, you can still win benefits by showing that your symptoms make any kind of full-time employment unrealistic.

Most of those cases hinge on a strong residual functional capacity (RFC) assessment, which is a detailed picture of what you can and can't reasonably do during an 8-hour workday. Working with your gastroenterologist, surgeon, and primary care physician, we focus the record on things like:

• Bathroom frequency and urgency. When you need a restroom on minutes' notice, multiple times a day, no competitive job can accommodate that schedule.
• Fatigue from chronic inflammation and malnutrition. Anemia, B12 deficiency, and protein loss leave many Crohn's patients without the stamina for a full shift, let alone a full week.
• Cognitive impact. Disrupted sleep from nighttime symptoms, brain fog tied to inflammation, and the mental load of managing constant pain affect focus, pace, and reliability on the job.
• Side effects from treatment. Long-term steroids, immunosuppressants, and biologics carry their own burden, including infections, joint pain, mood swings, and weight changes that compound your functional limits.
• Recovery time between flares. Even on a "good week", many Crohn's patients need significant downtime after a flare, which translates to absenteeism that no employer will tolerate long-term.

You don't have to be in the hospital every month to win. You have to be able to show, through credible medical evidence, that you can't reliably maintain a 40-hour week, and that's where we focus the case.

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Has Crohn's Made Working Impossible?

Managing the disease is already a full-time job. Let us take over the legal one and pursue the benefits you're entitled to.

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