Car Accidents and Soft Tissue Injuries
As a Delaware car accident attorney, one of the battles I have to fight for a lot of my clients who suffer a sprain and strain of their neck (cervical strain & sprain) or back (lumbar strain & sprain) has to do with the way insurance companies try to minimize the consequences of what they call a “soft tissue injury.” One of the things they say is that these injuries don’t show up on an MRI or a CT Scan. It’s as if they’re saying if you can’t see the injury, it doesn’t exist. In other words, they’re calling you a liar.
Next thing they do is send you to a doctor who they choose for what they call an “independent” medical examination. They affectionately refer to this as an “IME.” Well, they’re not independent at all. They’re conducted by a doctor who gets paid a lot of money to see you for less than 30 minutes. He disagrees with your doctor about the nature of your injury and the treatment you’ve been receiving. (I have to admit that every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you’ll be seen by an ethical doctor who won’t try to distort the truth).
How do these doctors distort the truth? For one thing, they say that after examining you, there are no objective findings to support your complaints of pain. Once again, if they can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. When I get to question these doctors, I take the deposition of these doctors, they have to admit the following:
(1) They’ve been practicing since the days before we had MRIs.
(2) Before we had MRIs, they provided medical treatment to patients who had complaints of pain even though nothing showed up on an X-Ray or a CT Scan.
(3) For their own patients, they provided treatment based on their subjective complaints.
(4) They agree that now that we have MRIs, we can actually see some of these injuries that we couldn’t see before.
(5) Some day, when medicine catches up, we’ll have machines that will allow the doctor to see injuries that don’t even show up on MRIs.
So basically, their report that my client has subjective complaints is true, but the conclusion they reach from that is not true. It’s like the hubble telescope. When the scientists turned it on, they saw planets and stars they’ve never seen before. These astronomical bodies didn’t just happen to come into existence the moment the telescope was turned on. They have always been there - we just couldn’t see them.
