Back Injuries – What is an injured back worth?
For personal injury and accident lawyers, back injuries often provide a very difficult file to handle given the complexities of how back injuries are diagnosed and prognosed. There are hundreds if not thousands of articles written on back injuries and on spine bio-mechanics. There is a significant amount of research on the issue. One quickly finds in reviewing the articles and research of the causes of back pain are numerous. For patients and practitioners, a back injury is a difficult injury to address. Back injuries can be debilitating and resulting in chronic pain. Back pain is usually an injury which reoccurs even after the initial back injury has subsided.
There are countless variables to a back injury the back pain and often, our clients who suffer a back injury often suffer from pains in their legs, arms, shoulders, neck, head, hips and other areas of their body. The muscles in the back intertwine with so much of the body in an area particularly vulnerable, the spine. When health care providers assess the causes of back pain, there often asked by the clients and their lawyers whether a particular incident has caused the back injury and thus the back pain. In many cases, the conclusion reached by healthcare providers is that while the current back pain may have been caused or materially contributed to by the incident, there is an underlying medical condition involving the back. In essence, the pre-existing medical condition was exacerbated by the incident. In many cases, the injured person had no symptoms of back pain but the incident in question resulted in significant debilitating back pain.
The therapy used to treat back pain varies between healthcare providers. It can involve anything from acupuncture, physiotherapy, massage therapy, ditna therapy, chiropractic manipulation and surgery. In most cases, the therapeutic steps must follow a progression and often back injuries take months if not years to fully heal.
Since many back injuries result in chronic pain the amount of compensation victims can receive increases. Our lawyers are familiar with back injury cases and have handled hundreds of personal injury claims involving back pain. We have relationships with various health care providers who can treat our clients and provide medical legal opinions which are an important component in resolving any personal injury claim. Assessing the amount of compensation our clients can obtain as a result of back pain is determined by many factors including the severity of the injury, the severity of the pain, the involvement of other parts of the body which may be affected by a back injury, the length of recovery, the extent of recovery, the resulting psychological or emotional trauma and the general impact on a person’s ability to perform the tasks of daily living. It is often impossible to determine even an appropriate range of compensation at the initial steps of being retained by a client with a back injury. It is only after our clients have received the proper medical treatment, diagnoses and recovered from their injuries that an appropriate assessment can be made.
At Quinn Thiele Mineault Grodzki LLP, our lawyers offer free consultations and work on a contingency fee basis since most of the files we handle are personal injury matters. If you or someone you care about has been injured as a result of the negligence of another person, please contact one of our Ottawa personal injury lawyers for a free consultation. Call us at 613-315-4878.
QTMG Law Firm – Ottawa accident and injury law firm.