If you are ever in a car accident, one of the most important things you need to do is to seek prompt medical treatment. Not only is your health at risk but so too is your ability to seek fair compensation for injuries caused by another driver.
Accurately understanding the timeline for car accident claims is essential to ensuring you don’t face difficulty in establishing your injuries and proving that another party caused them. Navigating the aftermath of an accident is hard enough without the added stress of setbacks and delays.
To avoid experiencing problems during a car accident claim, you must understand the significance of prompt medical treatment. Let’s dive into why this is a necessity now.
Injury Documentation
With any car accident, you’ll need to have documentation that details your injuries.
It is not enough to verbally claim you received injuries during an accident. Instead, you must visit a doctor and receive a report that outlines your injuries.
With clear documentation of your injuries and their extent, you can then use that information to determine their legal value.
Alternatively, if you don’t receive any treatment or if you wait until your injuries have healed, then there will be nothing to document. In turn, there are no documented damages that you can legally pursue compensation for.
Opting to get your medical visit out of the way early ensures that it happens before other concerns take priority.
Connecting Injuries and Accidents
Documentation of your medical condition is also essential to connect your injuries to your accident.
Car accidents can cause a variety of injuries depending on how the accident happened and additional factors like speed and weather conditions. Minor accidents generally result in less serious injuries and the opposite is also true.
Because of this, you need to be able to claim injuries that accurately correspond to the accident you were in. A medical examination is the best way to achieve this.
Medical examiners will inspect your body and indicate the types of injuries you have. This can then be used to determine how they could have potentially been caused and if those explanations align with the circumstances of your accident.
Medical documentation will help to establish credibility and prove fault when pursuing a personal injury lawsuit, meaning a quicker visit produces a smoother outcome.
Delays Cause Questions
Why prompt medical treatment matters is because the opposite only raises questions and challenges when pursuing a legal case.
An opposing lawyer in a personal injury lawsuit may ask why you choose to delay medical treatment if your injuries were so severe. Then, if they weren’t severe enough to seek treatment, are they significant enough to receive compensation for?
Taking things further, delaying medical treatment can blur the lines indicating that the accident in question caused your injuries. Now, they might be claimed as a pre-existing condition or unrelated to the crash and not the other party’s concern.
You may have a reasonable answer to these questions and concerns like perhaps you lack health insurance or fear medical institutions. That said, failing to seek out treatment will make you look suspicious and greatly complicate the ability to receive compensation.
Health Complications
Finally, you should seek medical treatment quickly after an accident for the sake of your health.
Even if you feel okay after an accident, you never know how serious it might have been and what conditions may pop up down the road. A thorough medical examination is the only way to accurately identify any injuries and health conditions you may have acquired as a result of your crash.
This is especially important when it comes to head injuries. Refraining from seeking the necessary treatment can quickly result in a worsening condition or impaired judgment and function that causes another accident or injury.
Your health and well-being are most important. Remember this and visit a doctor after any accident, regardless of how serious you think the accident was.
Closing Thoughts
Swiftly seeking a doctor for an examination should be one of your highest priorities after a car accident. While you may have reasons to avoid medical treatment, this is a big mistake that will permanently sabotage any chances you have in a personal injury lawsuit.
Receiving prompt medical treatment is mandatory if you want to effectively establish damages and prove fault while also ensuring your well-being. Medical visits enable this by creating physical documentation of the details of your injuries and connecting them to your accident.
If you’ve been injured because another driver acted poorly, the accident is their fault and your losses are their responsibility. You deserve justice and compensation for your losses and this begins with a timely visit to a doctor following your crash.
