If he attested in October 2019 that his disease was unrelated to working in coal mines, it's curious that he's a black lung claimant under a statute that requires the miner to have or have had pneuomoconiosis and for some causal link to exist between that and their work as a miner.

Seems he wants to have it both ways. Jeopardizing the safety of his employees with his opposition to regulations is justified - except when it affects him personally. Then, he should be entitled to benefits and remedies under the law.

Idiopathic means we looked at the things we know how to diagnose and it wasn’t those. The exclusion process is an elimination process.

Test for all the plausible causes, and if there’s nothing left you shrug and call it idiopathic. So either he was tested, or the doctors thought his symptoms were very atypical and didn’t run the test.

(I know two people and a pet with idiopathic something or other. In the cat’s case, the treatment was the same as the least invasive treatments for the common cause. The humans are just SOL.)

You're correct. In fact, it seems odd to me that a doctor would have diagnosed IPF in someone who had worked in coal mines for that long. As far as I know, the symptoms of black lung are basically indistinguishable from IPF. I'm not a doctor, but my father died of IPF, and his father died from black lung (steel industry, not coal, but they have the same risks).

They could have excluded that specific cause, perhaps? Odd, though, since "idiopathic" means "we don't know why this happened".