You really want to ruin your personal injury case? You want to drive your attorney crazy? Don’t get any medical treatment. Call your attorney complaining of pain and never go to the doctor. The insurance companies and defense attorneys love those types of cases because they’re so easy to defend. Jurors do not believe that you’re in pain if you don’t go to the doctor. Everybody expects that if you’re in pain, you go to the doctor and get the treatment you need or at least get a consultation. In our system of justice, it is expected that you make an attempt to mitigate your damages. That means that if you’re in pain, you go to a doctor and try to get better.
You can’t just sit on a couch and be in pain in order to try to collect more money. Claiming that you’re too busy, you started a new job, or couldn’t get the time off work is not a good excuse. Although sometimes I’ve been able to successfully argue that certain medical procedures weren’t done because they were too expensive. The key, however, in those cases was that my client went and got the consultations and told the doctors how they were feeling. So the takeaway: get the medical treatment.
