Let’s talk about three mistakes you need to try to avoid that can lower the final dollar amount we can get for your injury claim. 

Mistake #1: Delay in Seeking Your First Treatment

If you’ve had a car accident and you have not been to the doctor at all yet, preferably you need to see a doctor within a day, or two or three days after an accident. Here’s what we have to battle against, and we can, we’ve been successful battling this, but the adjuster is just going to say, “Well, you must not be hurt that bad if you waited a week to go to the doctor.” 

Seeking treatment early documents:

• The fact that you had an accident
• The fact that you were hurt in that accident
• What your pain levels were early on 
• The type of treatment that you’re going to need

Mistake #2: Not Reporting Injuries at your First Treatment

Report ALL injuries that you have on ALL body parts, no matter how insignificant. If you have any scratch, bruise, pain, swelling, soreness of any joint, ankle, shin, go ahead and report it. The reason why it’s important is, initially your doctor and you might be focusing on, say, your neck pain. Once that subsides, you may realize that you also have a knee problem or your ankle got jammed in the floorboard during the accident, and you need some treatment for the knee or the ankle. Well, if you didn’t report that in the initial doctor visit, guess what the adjuster is going to do? They’re going to try to not pay for that medical treatment because you didn’t report any complaints initially.

Mistake #3: Gaps in Medical Treatment

Gaps in medical treatment is one of the biggest killers of an injury claim. What that means is when you’re going to a doctor, try not to miss appointments, try not to skip appointments, try not to reschedule appointments, because all those things get noted in the medical record. The adjuster is going to see those medical records, and similar to what we said before, an insurance adjuster is going to say, “Well, you must not be hurting that bad if you’re missing appointments.” That’s what we want to avoid. 

Follow your doctor’s orders. If the doctor wants you to do home exercises, don’t let the adjuster see that the doctor put in the note that you haven’t been doing your home exercises or that the patient admits that he’s not taking his medications, or anything of that nature because, as you know, that’s what an adjuster is going to read into to try to either deny your claim or pay the least amount possible. That’s what we’re battling, is an insurance adjuster who’s trying to poke holes in all of your injury claim.