We’ve represented many victims with neck injury claims during our 20 plus years of practicing personal injury law. A neck injury is no laughing matter. Given that there is no real way to immobilize the neck, pain from even a minor injury can be considerable–and difficult to ignore. Quality of life drops dramatically in the wake of a neck injury, and the healing process is often long and arduous.
If you have suffered a neck injury due to someone else’s negligence, you should hire an experienced personal injury lawyer and file a neck injury claim to seek the compensation that you are owed.
Learn more about neck injury claims and the kind of compensation that you can expect to receive by reading on below.
How Do Neck Injuries Happen?
Car accidents are far and away the leading cause of neck injury claims. If you have suffered a neck injury, chances are that it happened during an automobile accident. Neck injuries happen for many other reasons too. People sometimes injure their necks in falls or from motorcycle accidents. Neck injuries sometimes occur while on the job or because of defective products. Sometimes they happen due to sudden trauma, which is the case with whiplash from a car crash. Other times they occur slowly over time due to repetitive motions. However they happen, they are unpleasant at best and life-threatening at worst. Worst of all, such injuries often occur due to other people’s negligence.
Types of Neck Injuries
Whiplash is the most common type of neck injury. As the name implies, it occurs when someone’s head and neck are quickly and violently whipped backward and forward. Most often, this happens during a car crash. Tendons, ligaments, muscles and nerves in the neck can all be affected by whiplash, and it can take six months or longer to fully heal.
Whiplash is a form of strain or sprain, but strains and sprains can occur for other reasons too. Other common types of neck injuries include herniated discs, in which the soft, inner material inside a disc pushes past its border to compress nearby nerve roots; nerve root compression, which can occur alone but most often happens due to herniated discs; spinal dislocation; and fracture.
Treatments and Outcomes for Neck Injuries
Doctors typically begin by taking a conservative approach when treating neck injuries. Most patients want to avoid surgery, which makes sense. Most often, patients are initially prescribed chiropractic care or physical therapy, but it depends on the exact nature of the injury. Doctors often prescribe anti-inflammatory medication to ease swelling and, in turn, reduce pain. Injections of various medications are sometimes prescribed too.
When conservative treatments don’t work, surgical intervention is sometimes necessary. The most common types of spinal surgeries are spinal decompression surgery, in which disc material and tissue is removed to alleviate a herniated disc, microdiscectomy or lumbar laminectomy, which is commonly used to treat spinal stenosis.
Compensation for Neck Injury Claims
If you live in Florida, injure your neck and file a claim, how much can you expect to receive in compensation? An experienced lawyer should be able to give you a ballpark estimate fairly quickly, but the amount varies according to many different factors. Neck injury victims are most commonly compensated for the medical costs that they have incurred and for lost wages from having to miss work. Depending on the precise circumstances of the accident and injury, you may also receive compensation for pain and suffering and for other losses.
How a Lawyer Can Help
The first thing to do following a car accident is to seek medical attention. Even if your neck feels okay, it may not be. The symptoms of a neck injury sometimes take time to appear. Once you are medically stable, don’t contact the insurance company. Instead, hire an experienced personal injury lawyer to represent you and your best interests. They will act as you advocate, communicating with insurance adjusters and others on your behalf. They will also independently investigate your case and work to build a strong one for you.
Neck injuries can be mild, severe or even deadly. Some are fairly easy to overcome while others can negatively affect you for the rest of your life. Regardless of where your injury falls on the scale, you deserve to be fairly compensated if your injury happened because of someone else’s negligence.
Do not leave things to chance. Insurance companies do not have your best interests in mind. The neck injury attorneys at David & Philpot, P.L. know this first hand after fighting insurance companies for victims over the past 20 years. Act quickly to ensure that your rights are protected. Contact David & Philpot, P.L. today for a free consultation.
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