When it comes to filing a personal injury claim, you are likely doing so in order to prevent falling into financial debt due to the unforeseen injury related expenses. The worse the injury, the higher the expenses. Because of this, the severity of your injuries will be the biggest determining factor when it comes to settlement negotiations and ultimately also the settlement award.
The money that has flown into the initial assessment and later the treatment of your injuries is what makes up the so called “medical special damages”. Commonly referred to as specials, these medical special damages are the biggest point of argument from the side of the insurance adjusters which makes it essential that you have collected sufficient evidence to prove the true extend of your injuries.
How can you prove pain?
Estimating the height of a settlement is difficult for a number of reasons, but one of the most major factors is assigning monetary value to somebody’s pain and suffering. Especially because the severity of the plaintiff’s pain plays such a big role in determining the monetary amount they are ultimately compensated with. Your injury lawyer in Red Deer plays an important role in securing the settlement amount.
Insurance companies have created a guide to ranking pain by which they have assigned pain levels on the basis of the type of injury somebody has sustained during an accident. There is arguably no scientific basis to this ranking system since broken bones, for example, cause different amounts of pain to different people depending on the type of break, the strength of pain killers and overall levels of pain tolerance, and yet that doesn’t stop them from continuing to utilize this system as the foundation of their evaluations.
The two overarching categories of injuries
There are two main means of classifications that insurance companies utilize: soft tissue injuries and hard injuries. Soft tissue injuries are considered to be invisible and can only be detected when the patient speaks up about their pain or discomfort. Hard injuries on the other hand are detectable by using medical equipment and/or by examining the patient, which means that they are generally taken more serious by insurers and are thus more likely to be met with high settlements.
Getting higher settlements for soft tissue injuries usually requires an assortment of other factors which come in to worsen the plaintiff’s condition in the eyes of the insurance company. When standing alone, soft tissue injuries are written off as not that serious since they are generally non-permanent and thus also not that dangerous, regardless of how much pain they are causing to the plaintiff.