Car accidents, rotator cuff tears, and other shoulder injuries

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:  Hello everybody.  This is Robert Mansour and I'm broadcasting from my office in Los Angeles.

One of my area's of practice is personal injury, and I wanted to make this brief video today to talk about an injury that happens more often than you think in car accidents and that is the shoulder rotator cuff tear. 

Now this can happen sometimes when there's direct trauma to the shoulder, but sometimes it can also happen as a result of a mechanical situation where maybe you're gripping the steering wheel very hard or you get hit and you move from side to side and you hit part of the car.

There are several ways that the shoulder tear can happen, or perhaps you were predisposed to the shoulder tear.  But it is certainly something that can happen. 

What usually occurs is the client feels that their shoulder's not right.  There's something wrong with it.  They can't lift it properly.  They come to lift their arm and they find the limitation.  And sometimes they're not quite sure what it is. 

So make sure that you mention the injury to the should to your doctor at the very beginning.  Don't just brush it off as nothing because what could happen is, you think it's nothing and you think it's going to get better over time, but then over the next several weeks you find that it's getting worse and worse and then the doctor diagnoses a shoulder tear. 

And then the insurance company says well, wait a minute.  You didn't mention this until several weeks later.  And this shoulder tear issue only occurred several weeks later so there must have been some other incident that occurred.

But if you have documented pain in the shoulder from the very beginning and the doctor is aware of it, if it's in your records, and then it ultimately shows up to be a tear, that makes a lot more sense to the insurance adjuster. 

So make sure, even if you feel something is not quite right in that shoulder, make sure to mention it to your doctor.  Even if you think it's going to get better overtime.  Because if it doesn't, at least you've protected yourself and documented the injury.

Rotator cuff tears are common in car accidents and so don't be surprised if you have a shoulder tear or something like that.  So don't be so quick to dismiss the injury is what I'm trying to say there. 

If you have any questions regarding this, please feel free to give me a call.  My name is Robert Mansour.  My number is 661-4141-7100, or you can visit my website www.valencialawyer.com. 

Thank you very much for watching.