Video Transcription
One of the most important things that you can do once you leave the scene of an accident, that is if you’re not transported by ambulance, is to go ahead and make sure that your health is checked out. What I mean by that is this, a lot of times these accidents happen and there’s not blood and guts, so to speak, or a broken bone or scar and you don’t have to be transported, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a serious injured from one of these accidents. In fact, the property damage itself can be very minor and he can have a rather significant injury. For example, you might have sustained a bulging disc or a herniated disc or some other, or just muscle strain and sprain that doesn’t go away for a long time. Now, one of the tricks the insurance company will use against you if the case goes to court or even one just trying to settle the case is that they’ll say that you told the police officer that you weren’t hurt.
So the best thing to do is that if you’re at the scene of the accident and you don’t know whether you’re the hurt or not, because many times the symptoms don’t show their side effects from maybe 24 hours, 48 hours. I’ve actually seen cases where the person didn’t think they were hurt at the scene of the accident, tried to bear and grin it tough enough. And then you know, maybe two weeks later or a month later, you know, discovered or had to concede and go in, finally cave in and go into the doctor only to learn that they hadn’t, you know, sustained either a ruptured disc or herniated disc, a bulging disc. And then what happens is the insurance company says, well, you didn’t complain at the scene of the accident to the officer, like you told the officer you weren’t hurt. So telling the officer that you’re not hurt when you really can’t determine that at the scene of the accident is not a good idea for your case.
The other thing is that if you wait those amounts of time and you don’t even go to an urgent care or your personal physician just to be checked out because if you’re feeling neck pain or strain or shoulder pain or strain or anything like that and it’s not medically documented, once again, the insurance company is going to go ahead and say, well, you know, you weren’t really hurt or you waited two weeks, he couldn’t have been that hurt and and so forth. That doesn’t really factor in or take into account the person’s individual pain tolerance levels. I’ve had Marines be able to stand a great deal of pain, didn’t go to the doctor, and then what happens is the insurance company fight us tooth and nail. We go in front of a jury and the jury will say, well, if that person wasn’t was really hard, they would’ve gone to the doctor much sooner.
So I’m not encouraging you to go to the doctor just for the sake of making a case. However, I am advising or recommending, of course, I can’t advise you technically because you’re not a client yet, but I am recommending that anybody involved in a motor vehicle accident should at least get checked out by a medical professional. If you’ve been in involved in an accident in the Kennesaw, Marietta, Acworth area of Cobb County, please give my office a call at (770) 792-1000.
