How Gaps or Delays in Medical Treatment Affect Your Injury Case

When it comes to medical decisions, they are ours, personally and ours alone to make. Which is why if, you’re in an accident and make a claim or file an injury lawsuit, it may come as a shock to hear the other side use as a defense, that you waiting too long to get treatment, or that there are “gaps in treatment,” or that you didn’t do something a doctor asked to do.

Does the Defendant or the insurance company have a right to demand you get medical treatment after your accident?

Delays and Gaps

There is a slight difference between a delay in treatment and a gap in treatment.

A delay in treatment means that you waited too long to first seek out medical care, after an accident.

A gap in treatment (or gaps), means that you did get medical attention but that there were long stretches of time between treatments or doctor visits–that is, there were extended periods of time where you sought out and received no medical attention at all, for the injuries sustained in your accident.

There is no time frame for how long is “too long,” or how much of a gap in getting medical treatment is too big. It is just all based on common sense and medical advice.

Why Does it Matter?

These two defenses come from the common belief that people who are injured, or in pain, seek out treatment. Vice-versa, someone who isn’t injured or truly in pain, doesn’t go to the doctor. Those are hard beliefs to overcome in the eyes of the Defendant or ultimately, a jury.

A Defendant may also raise causation issues in your case as time goes on and you’re not getting treatment, and while you are going about your daily life. That gives them the chance to say that you had the opportunity to injure yourself doing other things, unrelated to the accident.

Explaining it to the Jury

This is a matter or perception vs reality in some ways, because there are often logical, rational reasons why someone may be in pain, or injured, and why they may not seek out or why they would wait to seek medical attention. And while you can explain to the other side why you waited or why you have a gap in treatment, that’s no substitute for actually getting medical attention.

There are some reasons why a gap in treatment may be explainable to a jury. We all have life events that we cannot control, that could keep us from getting medical attention. Financial issues also may get in the way of getting the immediate attention you don’t need.

In some cases, certain injuries may not even hurt until a few days after your accident.

Understand that nobody is telling you to get a procedure you don’t want or need, or that you should have to go to a doctor if you aren’t injured. And yes, you do have a right to opt to forgo a surgery or to refuse to take a medicine, or to opt to make whatever medical decisions for yourself that you want to make.

Ask us about how medical care might affect your injury case. Call our Boston personal injury lawyers at The Law Office of Joseph Linnehan, Jr. today at 617-275-4200 for help.

Source:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11353723/