If you were injured in an accident, it is important to follow through with all medical recommendations. In many cases, when you seek treatment and how you follow through with your treatment are going to be heavily scrutinized when you file a claim.
The defense can use gaps in medical treatment to attempt to reduce how much they pay you or dismiss your claim entirely. If you do not follow through with recommended medical care, the court or insurance company might find that the injuries were not from this accident, that they were not actually that serious, or that it is unreasonable to pay for care when you were fine going without it at various points.
For help with your personal injury case, call The Queenan Law Firm’s Arlington personal injury attorneys at (817) 476-1797.
How Skipping Treatment Hurts Your Injury Case
When you are injured after an accident and the EMTs or ER doctors recommend certain care to deal with the effects of the accident, it is important that you follow through with all recommendations or face these consequences.
You Don’t Get Better
First and foremost, if you don’t get medical care, you might not get better. Your goal should be to get back to as close to 100% as you can. Throwing in the towel and accepting the injuries is not a good way to move forward with your life.
Failure to Mitigate Damages
A gap in care might mean that you ultimately do not get all the care that you really needed to get better. This could mean that you ultimately recover to a lower degree.
Legally speaking, it is your responsibility as the victim to get all of the required care you need to try to get back to 100% – to try “mitigate” the damages you faced. If you end up below 100% or your injuries actually get worse because you allowed your treatment to lapse, the defendant is not responsible for that reduced function or increased pain and suffering.
No Proof of Injuries
Getting medical care is the best way to document your injuries. If you walk into court fully healed, you will have no evidence of how bad the injuries were, how much they hurt you, how much you suffered, etc. Your testimony will be the only proof.
Having medical records helps you prove you had injuries, since you cannot get proof of the injuries after they healed. Records also detail precisely how serious they were, something you might not be able to explain. Even photographs of the injuries are not as good as detailed medical records.
Harder to Prove Reasonableness
If the doctors who treated you set you up with a treatment plan, appointments to meet, and physical therapy or other follow-up care, it will likely be seen as reasonable and necessary. This allows you to get compensation for those medical expenses. However, gaps in treatment can allow defendants to claim the opposite.
Harder to Prove Care was Necessary
If your treatment was truly necessary, you wouldn’t be okay skipping it. If you missed appointments and didn’t receive certain care, and you were ultimately okay, the defense will argue that you probably didn’t need that care after all.
Even if you change your mind and go back for care later, the insurance company will use that gap against you.
How Delaying Treatment Hurts Your Injury Case
Just as gaps in treatment can be used against you, delaying treatment can show similar issues.
Harder to Prove Necessity
If you wait until days or weeks after the injury to get treatment, the insurance companies will claim that your treatment was not actually necessary or that your injuries got worse because of your failure to seek treatment. Whether you were hurt at work, in a car accident, or by a defective product, it is better to go to the hospital and get the injury looked at right away than to wait and potentially have your injuries get worse.
Lack of “Seriousness”
Going to the doctor right away shows that your injury was indeed serious. If you wait days before seeking damages, it will be harder to claim down the road that your injuries were actually severe. This would hurt any claims from your Texas personal injury lawyer that your injuries were severe.
If the insurance company sees that you were okay for a couple of days, they might even try to say that you are faking your injury now.
Inability to Link Injuries to the Accident
Going to the doctor creates a record of treatment on the same day as the injury. If you claim to have been involved in an accident, and you claim that the defendant caused that accident, but then you seek treatment days or weeks later, it will be harder to prove that treatment was actually related to the accident. Dozens of things can happen in the meantime.
That last point is probably the most important: if you don’t have proof that your injuries were actually caused by this accident, you can’t get damages paid at all.
FAQs for Gaps in Medical Treatment
If I Start Getting Care, then Stop, Can I Still Get Damages?
If you stopped getting care at some point, we have to look at whether it actually affected your case in any way. If it makes your injuries look less severe or makes the treatment you did receive unnecessary if you were able to go without for months, then it will be harder to claim you need the care at all.
If you were essentially healed when you stopped getting care, and it really didn’t affect your healing process or outcomes, then it might not affect your case (and even save the defense some money).
Can the Defense Use My Medical Records?
Once you bring an injury case to court, your medical condition – and the records of your treatment – are all on the table to be criticized. The defense can look into your medical records and search for gaps, missed care, and other issues, and use the records against you.
This is why it is so important to get the care you need, follow through with recommendations, and continue care until the doctors say you can stop.
What if My Doctor is Keeping Me in Treatment Too Long?
Sometimes you just want to be done with your medical treatment or rehabilitation and move on with your life, but your doctors disagree. Often, doctors keep patients in treatment because that is the recommended course of treatment, not because they want to charge for more physical therapy sessions or appointments.
If you stop care early – even when you think you’re “better” – you might get worse again in ways you cannot predict. It is often best to trust the doctors; there might be good reasons you need an extra few sessions after signs of improvement.
In any case, you can get a second opinion if you think your doctor is wrong.
Can I Get Traditional Chinese Medicine, Acupuncture, Ayurvedic, or Holistic Treatments Covered?
If you start receiving medical treatment at a hospital and then turn to holistic or traditional therapies instead, the defense might argue that you “stopped” receiving “medical care.” This could open you to the same kinds of arguments above – that your injuries were not that bad, that you did not need medical care – no matter how much you believe in these traditional or holistic therapies.
Talk to our Texas injury lawyers about what kinds of care can be covered in an injury lawsuit. If you can get a licensed doctor to recommend or prescribe chiropractic care, acupuncture, or other traditional therapies, then we may be able to convince a jury that these therapies were actually part of your official treatment plan and that you deserve compensation for them.
Call Our Texas Personal Injury Lawyers Today
For your free case review, call The Queenan Law Firm’s Odessa personal injury lawyers at (817) 476-1797.