How Soon Should I Seek Medical Treatment After An Auto Accident?
You should seek treatment after an auto accident as soon as reasonably possible. If you have an obvious and painful injury, you should seek help at a hospital emergency room. If you deem your injury to not be of the severity to require ER treatment, then see your primary care doctor as soon as you can get an appointment. If your primary care doctor feels you need to see a specialist for your particular type injury, then you need to do that right away. There should be no gaps in your treatment.
However, delayed symptoms happen from time to time. It would be up to me as your attorney to convince the insurance company of why you waited to contact them or why you waited to seek medical attention. The fact that the symptom didn’t appear until sometime later is definitely demonstrable as a medical matter. It is not unusual for all this to happen and for the condition to develop slowly over a period of time. There is no fixed limit to seek medical care other than that you must file your suit for the accident within that one-year delay period. You don’t delay. If you need to go to a doctor, you go to the doctor. Just because you didn’t go right after the accident, you still have a claim.
Why Is It Important To Follow Doctor’s Recommendations In An Auto Accident Claim?
It is important to follow doctor’s recommendations in an auto accident claim because it is important not to have any gaps in your treatment. The person who is hurt normally would want to stop hurting, so you follow your doctor’s orders. If he tells you to go to physical therapy, you go to physical therapy. If he tells you to take your medication, you take your medication. The adjuster for the insurance company that’s at fault in the collision will secure copies of all of your medical records. If you start treating but then you do not go to the doctor for a while or do not take your medications or go to physical therapy then that is not good. That’s a gap in your treatment. This is one of the things that the adjuster or even ultimately the court could use against you. It’s important that you get medical attention and that you continue it on a regular basis. Take your medication on a regular basis or physical therapy. Go for your x-rays or your CT Scans. It should be a continuous type of treatment from the time of the accident up to the time that your claim is no longer active. You’ve reached what we call Maximum Medical Improvement and the doctor dismisses you from his care.
What Factors May Cause A Case To Go Into Litigation?
There are many things that could cause a case to go into litigation. One of the most common ones that we find is that the injured claimant overvalues the worth of his claim. There is so much misinformation out on the Internet these days. Clients see all these big bucks people say they received. But they are just bragging. Actually they didn’t get that much money. You have to be careful and you need an educated evaluation of your claim by your own attorney to see what the actual value of your claim is. We have law books to look at and past cases, past trials and so forth to help the claimant value his claim and to give us the flexibility to settle it for a high reasonable amount.
On the other side of the coin, however, another reason that causes claims to go to trial is that the at-fault insurance company’s adjuster places an unreasonably low value to your injuries. These people, these adjusters, may be handling hundreds of claims and they’ll get your claim confused with somebody else’s or they got up on the wrong side of the bed one day and they didn’t look at the true value of your claim, so they get unreasonable. When they get unreasonable, that’s when I’ve got to take the matter to trial. Another thing that causes claims to go to trial is the gaps in treatment that I’ve mentioned previously. In other words, your treatment should be a continuous thing so you have to be careful as a claimant that you listen to what your doctor says, that you see the doctor when you’re supposed to and take your medication or go to your physical therapy when you’re supposed to.
Another thing that causes claims to go to trial is the fault issue, which I’ve mentioned back at the very first of this series of questions and answers. If it’s a question, for example, of two drivers who hit at an intersection controlled by a traffic light and they each say that they had a green light then that’s a hard matter to prove unless there is some independent witness located. The same thing with the intersectional collision where there is no traffic light control device. Another factor that causes the claim to go to trial is that the claimant has just not been following his doctor’s recommended treatment. I can’t emphasize enough that once the claimant starts going to the doctor, he should be there to be treated, listen to what the doctor says, and do what the doctor says. These are all factors that cause claims to go to trial.
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