Snellings Law PLLC Attorneys are Personal Injury Trial Lawyers
Reporting Every Injury and Symptom
Reporting injuries and Symptoms to your treatment providers
One thing I have seen over and over again when I sit down with injury victims is how few people are reporting every injury and symptom to their treatment providers. Most of our clients tend to focus on the one or two injuries causing them the most pain or worry. They report those to their physicians and just put the others on the back-burner to be addressed at a later date. As I go through the interview process and ask them about each body part, head-to-toe, there are usually numerous injuries or symptoms that will appear nowhere in any initial medical records because the victim never reported them. By failing to provide all of your symptoms to your treating physician, you are depriving them of the full picture they need to see in order to fully diagnose and treat your injuries.
Fully reporting injuries and symptoms is also important as it relates to your bodily injury claim. If symptoms first start appearing in the medical records weeks or even months after the initial injury, the insurance adjuster will likely argue they are not related to the crash and refuse to provide any compensation for them.
Importance of Reporting Every Symptom
It is also incredibly important to note every symptom you are experiencing to each and every provider you see. This may go against our common sense when seeing certain types of physicians. For instance, most of us would probably not tell our neurologist about our knee pain because we know we are there to treat for our headaches and neurological symptoms. Unfortunately, the way many digital medical records work is that everything is marked as negative or normal unless the doctor or their assistant goes in and makes an entry to change it. Therefore, when symptoms go unreported, the medical record software will often mark them as negative.
Insurance adjusters are trained to pick up on these errors and use them to their advantage in negotiations. They will argue that the victim’s pain was not that serious as she was not even reporting it to all of her doctors, in fact, many of the conditions were marked as normal.
A seasoned personal injury attorney can help walk you through all of these traps and pitfalls associated with your personal injury claims. If you or a loved one has been injured due to someone else’s negligence, please do not hesitate to consult a personal injury attorney. At Snellings Law PC, our entire practice is focused on helping personal injury victims. You can reach us at 214-387-0387 and set up your free consultation.