The very first thing that you should do after you are involved in a car accident is seek medical treatment if you are injured. Do not wait if you can avoid it. Waiting can cause real problems for you down the road. But, just seeing a doctor, chiropractor, or other healthcare provider is not enough. You need to make sure that you do what you can do to receive the best treatment available from your healthcare provider and that the medical records for those providers reflect your injuries and your treatment.
How should I talk to my doctor?
The most important thing that you can do when you talk to your doctor is be 100% truthful and 100% thorough. Your doctor—either in their office or a doctor in the emergency room—will begin their communication with you by asking you a series of questions about your injuries and your pain. You must be 100% honest with them and make sure that they document all the pain that you are experiencing. Tell them where you hurt, how bad you hurt, and when the pain began. Do not sugar-coat your pain or try to minimize your pain. If you leave something out, or you minimize your pain, that will be used against you later either by the insurance company insuring the person who hit you, or the defense lawyer who represents the bad guy when a trial occurs. You must be 100% thorough in making sure that all your aches and pains are appropriately document by your healthcare provider and that they are fully aware of the aches and pains that you are experiencing. You may feel like you are overly complaining, but the reality is that you have to tell your doctor everything so that they can appropriately diagnose your injuries and so that they can determine how best to treat your injuries and make you better.
Why is it important that I talk truthfully and thorough with my doctors?
Part of the process associated with getting you fairly and justly compensated for the injuries that were caused to you by someone else in a car accident is making sure that your medical records are complete and thorough and that all of your injuries are appropriately documented. If you do not tell your doctors about aches and pains that you are experiencing as a result of this crash, you will not be able to prove that your injuries were the result of the collision caused by the bad driver. If you cannot prove it was caused by them, you cannot recover damages from them for those injuries. One of the oldest tricks in the book put forward by insurance companies and by defense attorneys is to argue that the injuries that you are now complaining about was not caused by the car crash, instead it was caused something else completely unrelated to the crash. The only way to avoid this defense is to ensure that your medical records are through and all your aches and pains are appropriately documented.