November 21, 2006

     As each holiday season begins, the painful memories of cases past come to mind.  With the holidays come family gatherings.   Family gathering preparations involve travel in cars, house cleaning, food preparation, gift exchanges, and the dreaded clean-up, dishes and homes.    If you're currently suffering from injuries sustained in a personal injury, please exercise extreme caution this time of year.   The holidays can be dangerous to your health and harmful to your personal injury case settlement value.  

    Insurance adjusters know from experience in reviewing thousands of claim files that people tend to "overdo it" this time of year.   Frequent bending, lifting, standing, sitting, and other physical activities that go hand in hand with the holiday season often result in follow up office visits with doctors and physical therapists.    These types of ordinary household or family activities are things you used to be able to enjoy.  Now, at least for the time being, time that should be spent savoring precious family time can be spent in discomfort and searching for your Ibuprofen, Motrin, or some other analgesic or medication.  

     Please exercise extreme caution, however, if you do feel the need to follow up with your medical provider during or after the holidays.   You are untrained in the personal injury claim process as are nearly all of the medical professionals.   Innocent stories of holiday pain can dramatically decrease your claim's value.   If you are experiencing symptoms of pain in the areas of your body that were injure in the collision that resulted in the pending claim, don't make the mistake of mislabeling your symptoms as a "new injury," "aggravation," "re-injured,"  "reoccurrence" or some other term that is an unintended mischaracterization of your condition. 

    These terms have distinct and powerful legal meanings while unknown to you but, can and will negatively impact your case's settlement value even though your use of those terms never intended to convey the legal definitions by adjusters and lawyers.   In short, new injuries, aggravations of a pre-existing condition, recurrences are terms that the untrained, injured person should eliminate from their vocabularies.  Those are terms you should leave to the trained professionals.   Simply explain to your medical professional that you couldn't enjoy your holidays because you experienced pain while doing normal physical tasks, whether it is cleaning, cooking, dishes, riding in a vehicle, standing, etc.   Of course, if your doctor or therapist issued physical restrictions on your activities, you must always follow your doctor or therapist's restriction orders.  

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