The importance of detailed and complete medical records

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

​Hello, everyone. This is Robert Mansour, and I wanted to shoot a brief video today about the importance of making sure that your medical records accurately and fully reflect what you went through in your car accident, so not only should your medical records reflect all of your injuries, they should also reflect how the accident affected your daily life, so let's first start with the injuries. If you go to the hospital or the emergency room or the doctor or whoever, chiropractor, after an accident, you want to make sure that you walk in with a very detailed list of every single thing that was injured in the accident, no matter how minor. Here's why: An issue that may not seem significant on day 1 may become significant a few weeks later, so if you don't mention it on day 1 and then it comes up a few weeks later, an insurance adjuster might say, "Well, wait a minute. I think you fabricated that. That didn't really happen in the accident. That was something different."
 
You just want to make sure that you mention all of your injuries, because when the insurance adjuster is evaluating your case, they're going to look at your medical records very carefully, and they're going to see what did you complain of to the doctor, so you can't just say, "My neck." That doesn't really help. You've got to say, "My neck radiating into my shoulders, radiating into my upper back." You want to be very specific about what it is that your injury actually is, so make sure that you are very detailed about that. As a matter of fact, if the police officers come to the scene of an accident, it is very important to tell the police officer or the emergency personnel what your injuries were, because they will write that down in the police report, more often than not, and if your injuries are listed in the police report, it lends a lot more credibility to your claim that you were injured, and the consistency of those injuries across the board. Your injury complaints at the scene were the same at the hospital, were the same at the doctor, were the same at the physical therapist...
 
It's very important to be very complete about it. The next thing that you really need to make sure that you articulate is, what limitations are you having from the accident? When you go for physical therapy or you go to the doctor, and they say, "How are you doing? What's going on," and you say, "Well, not so good," or, "A little bit better," that doesn't really help paint a very good picture of what you're going through. So for example, you might say, "Well, I'm having trouble taking a shower. It hurts when I put my clothes on in the morning. I can't bend down to tie my shoes. I'm in excruciating pain on a daily basis. I can't even drive to work. I can't pick up my kids and play with them. I can't garden. I can't do X, Y, or Z. I'm having trouble doing chores at the house." I call that "putting ornaments on the tree," decorating the tree. The tree is the injuries, but the ornaments on the tree are how the injuries affected your daily life, your work, your schooling, your home life.
 
It is very important to articulate all of that to your doctors, because it's going to end up in the medical records, and that's what the insurance adjuster's going to be looking at.  So the medical records are your opportunity to tell the adjuster the complete story of how the accident affected you. Not just the injuries, but the effects of those injuries. I always tell my clients, "When you go in for treatment after a car accident, whether it's for an evaluation, physical therapy, or anything like that, I want you to imagine the insurance adjuster sitting on your shoulder with a tablet, writing everything down that you say. They've got their clipboard right there, and they're writing everything down that you say to the doctor, so if you can imagine that, you're going to be more complete about it, because the adjuster's sitting there on your shoulder, basically being very skeptical that you were injured at all, as most of them often are. So this is your chance to be very complete about your injuries and how the accident affected you." I hope you found this video helpful. Thank you very much for watching.

Please call (661) 414-7100 if you've been injured in a serious car accident. Personal injury lawyer Robert Mansour helps clients involved in serious auto accidents in Santa Clarita, California and its surrounding communities.