Top Reasons To Visit A Doctor After You’ve Been In A Vehicle Accident
There are lots of reasons you should visit a doctor after you've been in a vehicle accident. Here's what you need to consider
Being in a car accident is a traumatic experience. In most instances, people who go through car accidents find it difficult to recollect how things really happened. In addition to trauma, you also experience an adrenaline rush.
With everything that is going on, you may become numb to pain. You may feel confused about the steps you need to take next and not really know how to find a doctor after a car accident. When this happens, many people assume that they are okay and opt not to seek immediate medical attention after the accident.
But, contrary to popular belief, visiting a doctor after a car accident is extremely important. Even though you may not be in pain, here are the top reasons you should see a doctor immediately after you’ve been in a car accident:
1. Avoid Long-term Health Problems
After getting involved in a car accident, you need to ensure that you are well. Though you may not be in pain, the only way you can be certain is to see a doctor. Avoid the thought that you can go through the incident. Rather, be wary of injuries that are not obviously noticeable, such as concussions, internal injuries, or whiplash
In many instances, such injuries become dangerous, causing you long-term health problems in future. Not only physical injuries, but traumatic accidents may also result in emotional and mental damage. People who get involved in car accidents can experience a wide range of mental ailments, such as stress, insomnia, post-trauma stress disorder, and anxiety. Moreover, accident victims may experience driving and car riding phobia.
Seeing a medical doctor enables you to get advice on the kind of treatment to seek if you need help to overcome emotional anguish and restart your life once more after going through an accident.
2. Prevent Questioning Of Accident Injuries
Failure to seek medical attention immediately after getting involved in a car accident can complicate your efforts to claim compensation. This is because the defendant will challenge the damages for which you seek compensation, arguing that those injuries may have occurred after the incident. As such, you may be faced with the challenge of linking your injuries to the accident.
For instance, you don’t seek medical attention after you’ve been in a car accident. A week after the incident, you experience leg pain. When you seek treatment for the leg pain, you make a decision to file a suit against the driver who was involved in the accident.
When you actualize your decision, the defendant can maximize several gaps to poke holes to your claims. They may claim that your pain resulted from other causes and not the accident.
3. Consolidate Evidence For Insurance Claim
The steps you take after the accident will affect your medical recovery, as well as your insurance claim. After a car accident, your medical costs can increase very fast. Immediately seeing a doctor following an accident could help you to get the documentation you need to make insurance claims.
This is critical because as they assess your claims, insurance firms review medical documents to determine whether or not you will receive compensation. Even so, insurance compensations are not as easy to claim as they sound. Insurance firms are always seeking to settle claims as fast and as little as possible.
Insurance companies try as much as possible to nullify the injuries suffered by claimants. This means utilizing any loophole that they find in your claim application, including the period between the time the accident occurred and the time when medical attention was sought. To avoid these challenges, have a doctor examine you and document your injuries and treatment process as soon as possible.
4. Document Your Medical Condition
Any car accident victim will want to focus on recovering from injuries first before thinking about anything else. However, immediate medical examination is necessary to ensure that every injury–whether mental, physical, or emotional–is documented.
There are two main reasons why you should get your medical condition documented. First is to ensure that you and your loved ones fully understand the extent of injuries suffered in a car accident. Second is to ensure that you have documented evidence to support any compensation that you may decide to seek.
To make certain that your documented medical condition reflects the actual damage suffered, you need to see a doctor as soon as you can following a car accident. This is because the longer the time between the accident and doctor examination, the more difficult it will be to determine and attribute injuries to the accident.
Examples of medical documents that serve as proof of car accident injuries include X-rays, patient files, and doctor’s notes.
Wrapping Up
The release of adrenaline in the body following a car accident sends your body to flight mode and shock. At that point, you feel fine. And, with seemingly no signs of physical injury, it’s easy to opt not to see a doctor. The danger with this is that you risk leaving internal injuries unattended and compromising the credibility of your compensation application. To prevent these things from happening, visit a doctor as soon as you can after a car accident.
