Personal injury lawyer John Kelly describes how an MRI can increase the settlement value of a personal injury claim.
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Transcript:
- Hi, this is John Kelly. I wanted to talk to you today about how an MRI can affect your settlement in a personal injury claim and whether it's worth getting an MRI if your doctor recommends one. Generally, to this question, the answer is going to be yes, it is highly recommended. If your doctor is telling you that it's possible that you have an injury that could be something that would benefit from seeing more detailed images from an MRI, you want to go ahead and get that done right away on your case. Now, an MRI is different a little bit from x-rays. X-rays are good for diagnosing things like fractures, dislocations and they're a little bit lower cost. The benefit of an MRI is that you actually can see some of the soft tissues and with personal injury claims, that's actually very relevant. Oftentimes with injuries that involve things like auto accidents, you have bulging discs in the back. You could have other injuries that don't always show a broken bone but may show kind of soft tissue injuries and that kind of thing, which an MRI can be useful for. I'm going to talk about how MRIs help your case and how they can add value. I have about five things that they can help with your case and then about five things that they can add value. What I mean by help is that they can kind of push your claim along and make sure that you're getting the right things that you need so that you can later add the value. The first thing is a MRI is going to be hard proof of your injury. What I mean by that is when we're trying to explain an injury to an insurance adjuster or another attorney, if we have hard proof of that, meaning actual injury images, we are in much better position to actually make that claim for you. If we have just a doctor saying it seems like there may be some bulging disc and it's just a narrative that they're writing down in their reports, no images attached, that isn't necessarily hard proof to these adjusters. They like to see it for themselves. And that kind of dovetails into the second thing. Images tell a better story than words. You actually have an image of something. If I can send a photograph of an injury, if someone breaks their nose in an accident and I can show a picture of them with bandages on their face to an adjuster, that's always helpful. The same applies with things inside your body that are going wrong that have injuries. If we can show a bulging disc, a closeup of the actual disc and the tissue bulging out, that's much more compelling to adjusters. It tells a lot more than just trying to have a diagnostic code that they're reading. Number three, it's a medically accepted diagnosis, meaning these doctors, this isn't pseudo science or anything like that, we have actual MDs that are using the science of MRI. It's generally accepted in the legal community and medical community so it's something that you don't have to worry about, that adjusters are going to know that they have to add value to your claim based on it. The fourth thing that I have is that bills and records will allow further treatment and the possibility of even things like surgery. So if you get these records early and you can see what your injuries are, it's very apparent what needs to happen then down the line so that doctors, you can send these images to different orthopedic doctors, to possible surgeons, and they can look at the 3D images and say, "Look, this what I think you need to do to treat moving forward." Getting the treatment that you need to get better is part of adding value to your claim because if you just sit on something, you don't have the images, you're just sitting in pain, you're not getting treatment, you're not adding value to your claim. You want to make sure that you're getting the right diagnosis, which would be the MRI, that would then later justify for their treatment. Then finally, five, you're not guessing as to what happened and that can, believe it or not, happen with a lot of claims. People go to a doctor, they have some scans done, maybe not in the right areas of their body or they're just told that it looks like it's a whiplash situation, that they can do some physical therapy.