When it comes to claiming medical bills as a result of a car accident, you need to be careful about how and what you submit. Ask your auto accident attorney about this, because if you submit too many alternative medical health practitioner bills, like invoices from a chiropractor – insurance companies tend to deny and/or devalue them. If your case is significant enough, always lead with your best expert. Sending an evaluation for renown back surgeon will carry more weight.
Despite the fact that many accident victims wind up with spinal cord injuries of some sort, often helped by seeing a chiropractor, insurance companies prefer conventional medical treatment involving scans, physiotherapy, steroid injections, and medications and so on. Time and time again, as an auto accident attorney, I have seen medical bills rejected by insurance companies because they felt there were too “many” chiropractic appointments.
The major problem with spinal cord injuries is that many of them develop into something worse later. Any auto accident attorney who has dealt with injuries like this is aware of this fact and will factor it into assessing a dollar amount for compensation. Often these injuries turn into long-term care situations and that means significant medical costs; costs a good auto accident attorney is usually able to recoup at trial.
This isn’t to say that visits to the chiropractor are not warranted nor are they discouraged. The issue with insurance companies appears to be that they have a hard time justifying paying out on too “many” treatments when conventional medical care is more acceptable. I’ve had a lot of clients come through my door wanting to hire me as their auto accident attorney and some of them have really heartbreaking stories about trying to find the proper care and getting the costs denied by the insurance company.
In many of the spinal cord and whiplash cases I have handled, the forward and backward impact a victim’s body sustains may cause very severe trauma, including traumatic brain injury. The very nature of these types of injuries often causes the victim untold pain, agony, suffering and a dramatically altered lifestyle. In fact, their whole life is no longer the way it used to be. As a persistent and aggressive auto accident attorney, it’s my job to go to bat for people in this predicament. They got there through no fault of their own.
Victims with severe injuries as a result of a car crash have often been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and suffer the terrible consequences. Many of them never even saw the accident coming. For instance, the case involving a woman driving a van the right way on the highway who was hit head-on by a car driving the wrong way in her lane. As an auto accident attorney, I know that her spinal cord injuries were so severe, she will never walk again. The man driving the car had been drinking.
That case was a prime example of negligence and recklessness on the part of the car driver who was drinking and driving. In cases like that, any settlements the auto accident attorney negotiates from the insurance company or court verdicts handed down, tend to be higher based on the severity of the injuries and the fact that they are life-altering.
When dealing with spinal cord injuries, the problems may be numerous and because of their nature, may not manifest themselves in the spine on presentation to a doctor. Even the person with the injury may not be aware the spine is the origin of their problems. Often car crash victims spend a lot of time going from one doctor to another to find out what is wrong with them and their auto accident attorney needs to know this for trial.
