A lot of people who get injured in a car accident don’t want to be “that” person — the one who runs to an attorney right away or starts a lawsuit over what amounts to a trivial injury.
Guess what? “That” person is largely a fiction. Insurance companies would like people to believe that a lot of claims for compensation after a car accident are inflated or unnecessary. If they can convince people to sign away their rights in exchange for a minuscule settlement, all the better for them!
Take whiplash injuries, for example. Many people think of whiplash as a sort of vague complaint of neck pain — nothing that can be medically verified or easily denied. A lot of folks think that anybody who wants a large settlement for a simple whiplash complaint is just making a grab for some insurance money.
Nothing could be further from the truth. A study just finished at the end of 2016 revealed that patients with chronic pain years after a whiplash injury had changes in blood flow into the areas of the brain responsible for pain perception and posture.
Researchers are still looking for a way to find a useful physical method to diagnose whiplash right after it happens because they acknowledge that the injury suffers from a prejudice — even patients who suffer from it convince themselves that it isn’t real.
However, attorneys know that whiplash is a real problem, and that many patients can have long-lasting effects from it.
One study examined patients who suffered from whiplash and followed them for two years after their injury. At the end of that time, less than a third had actually recovered. Another 30 percent endured pain that was bad enough to intrude on their daily lives — while 4 percent had developed full-blown disabilities from the whiplash.
Another real shocker from the study, however, was the effect of whiplash on a patient’s mental health. The mental health declined in 81 percent of the patients with chronic whiplash pain — all of whom had tested normally before.
Whiplash is a real injury and you deserve real medical care and compensation. If you’ve suffered a whiplash injury in a vehicular accident, talk to an attorney today.
Source: ScienceDaily, “Whiplash symptoms are caused by actual changes in the brain,” accessed Sep. 14, 2017