If you are injured in a car accident, you should immediately seek medical attention. This is a question we hear a lot from people that were recently in a crash. The only way to know how injured you are is to let a trained medical professional evaluate your injuries.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
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In our ongoing series here on Hill Law Firm cases we’ve been discussing some of the common questions we get from people following car crashes. As previously stated, sometimes we get calls while people are still at the scene of a car crash and sometimes they call us weeks, months or maybe even a year following.
We mostly had been talking about the calls we get from people we know at the scene of a crash. Usually, these are former clients or friends of clients or family members or friends that we’ve known and they’ll call us because they want to make sure they don’t do something wrong that allows their insurance or the other side’s insurance to deny their claim.
One of the questions we get often is, should I go see a doctor. Across the board, I tell clients when they come in at any stage of the litigation or their case claim process that I’m not a doctor. I can’t give them medical advice and if they think they’re hurt, they need to go see somebody. What the insurance companies like to do is they like to say that if you didn’t go see a doctor in X number of days following the crash, that you must not have been hurt. I don’t play those games. I don’t let the insurance adjuster tell my clients whether they’re hurt or not.
I let the doctors decide whether somebody is injured. A few examples I always think of is one of the more common examples is we’ll get calls from people following a crash and they’ll say, well, I’m stiff or I feel weird, but I’m not in a lot of pain. In the next day or 24 or 48 hours later, they call and they say that they’re in terrible pain. At the scene of the crash, people seem to have adrenaline or something going on in their system that lets them know they’re hurt, but they’re not feeling the pain just yet.
At any point along that process, I tell them, “If you start to hurt, you need to go see somebody.” Another thing that we see a lot is people who bang their heads in crashes or with their heads so fast, they end up with a concussion, and those symptoms present overtime sometimes. We’ll have clients that’ll say after a crash that they have a really bad headache and then they start realizing they have problems sleeping. They realize that they’re nauseated. Maybe they’re dizzy and maybe they’re having memory issues, but some of those symptoms come on overtime.
What we tell everybody, our clients, our friends, our family is that if you think you’re injured, you should go see a doctor or a medical professional but the only one that can determine whether or not you’re injured or in pain is you. Listen to your body, listen to yourself, and if you think you’ve been injured following a crash or an accident or an incident, go see a doctor. Go seek professional medical help.
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