Hi. My name is Zachary Cole with Probinsky & Cole. One common question that we hear a lot is, “Will an MRI increase the value of my auto accident claim or other type of accident claim?” and the answer is almost always, with our clients at least, yes. The reason for that is most of our clients have suffered some sort of traumatic injury.
A common place for those injuries and car crashes at least is to the spine. Now an MRI is going to show you a lot of things that an X-ray won’t. If you go to the emergency room, you’re going to get a big bill from the emergency room. They will probably run you through some CT scans or X-rays but they’re usually not going to do an MRI.
An MRI will show you the status of your discs, of your spine, the cushions between each vertebrate in your spine. When you have a lot of torque or back and forth motion on your spine that your body is not capable of bearing the brunt of, then those discs can be damaged and when they’re damaged, unfortunately they push on nerves which causes pain. It can cause weakness in your arms or your legs. It can cause numbness and tingling and things like those.
Now for me, I was involved in a pretty serious accident several years ago. I went to the ER and had X-rays and they said, “You’re fine. You just sprained your neck.” But over the next couple of months, I noticed that one of my arms started to atrophy. My pain wasn’t getting any better. In fact it was getting worse and I had significant numbness in my hand and portions of my arm. So I knew something was wrong.
I went and got an MRI and sure enough, there was a pretty serious herniation. So insurance companies look at things like this because it’s one thing for a plaintiff or an individual that was in an accident to say, “I’m hurting. Something is wrong with me.” But they want proof that you’re hurt and an MRI is a great way to give them just that or give a jury just that.
So in most of our cases, we highly recommend that our clients seek medical care in the form of getting an MRI or a nerve conduction study to determine exactly what’s wrong with them and even more importantly, it helps your doctors take better care of you and address the problems that you have going on in your body.
So if you’ve been in an accident or know anybody else that has been that would like some legal advice, please give us a call at 941-371-8800. Thank you.
