Back Surgery After a Car Accident l Seattle Injury Attorney

I handle many auto accident cases where my client ultimately needs neck or back surgery.  Often times the surgery is not recommended for several months or sometimes years following the accident.  Unless the injuries were acute and severe (i.e., broken vertebrae, clear herniation, etc.), most back injuries are going to be treated conservatively.  Conservative treatment means the treatment is non-invasive or non-surgical, and may consist of physical therapy, medication, chiropractic, acupuncture, and massage.

When surgery is not recommended for many months or years following the accident, this gives the insurance company some room to argue that the surgery is unrelated to the accident in question.  How is this possible?  Well, there are a number of doctors, including surgeons, who routinely evaluate injured victims at the request of insurance companies.  Some of these doctors make a lot of money doing this.  I know of one Seattle neurologist who has made more than $2.5 Million testifying as an insruance company medical expert over the last 15 years.

Often times the doctor hired by the insurance company will look for anything in the patient’s medical history where it can be argued that the need for surgery was due to a pre-existing medical condition, like an old injury, a past back surgery, or some other event.  One time a defense doctor tried to blame my injured client’s surgery on an incident where she bent over to pick up her laundry which caused a severe aggravation of her already existing back pain.  It did not matter that my client had ongoing and severe back pain since the date of the accident two months earlier.

Often times the insurance company doctor will try to blame a car accident victim’s back pain complaints on a pre-existing “degenerative” condition, despite the fact that the person never had back pain complaints before the auto accident.  What is a degenerative spine condition?  It is mostly a normal occurrence that is somewhat dependent on the aging process.  As we age, our spines deteriorate to a certain extent.  The discs dry out and lose their shock-absorbing qualities.  The spinal joints become enlarged and/or develop osteophytes with normal wear and tear.  Most of us encounter these changes without experiencing any symptoms of pain and discomfort.  Some of us may experience symptoms but they usually go away with time.  But this “degenerative” condition allows the insurance company doctor to argue, sometimes quite convincingly, that the person’s ongoing or chronic symptoms are due to this pre-existing condition and not the car accident.

When a person experiences chronic neck or back problems following a car accident (defined as pain lasting longer than 3 months), it is usually a good idea to hire counsel to represent your interests.  Not every chronic back pain case leads to surgery, but many do.  I have represented several dozen car accident victims who developed chronic neck or back pain and then underwent surgery one or two years later.  In these cases, it is extremely important that you have an attorney who knows the medicine and can effectively cross-examine the insurance company doctor to reveal holes in that doctor’s opinions. 

It has taken me several years of reviewing medical journals, talking to doctors, attending medical seminars, and taking numerous depositions of insurance company doctors to learn the medicine of spine trauma and the treatment that is usually prescribed and recommended for these types of injuries.  Because of this, I know when an insurance company doctor is being “intellectually dishonest” when it comes to examining and offering opinions about my injured client.  Because spine medicine is incredibly complex, often with no clear consensus among practitioners about the exact diagnosis, it is easy for the insurance company doctor to offer “opinions” that stretch the truth and perhaps contradict the conventional wisdom of those doctors who actually specialize in spine medicine.