Insurance Is A Pain - Exposing The No Crash No Cash Myth

Advice on Low Property Damage Cases

One of the most frustrating hurdles you face as an injury-attorney is the problem of low property auto damage cases. Insurance adjusters have been trained to flag claims with less than $1,000 in property damage for "special investigation". They have been taught that these low damage vehicle collisions were unlikely to have caused any injury and as a result, must be handled as a potentially fraudulent claim.

So why are we seeing more and more low damage collisions to begin with? The decline in property damage is driven by the same force is driven by the same force that dictates most of the decisions in the insurance: saving the carriers money. It's no coincidence that since The Insurance Institute For Highway Safety (IIHS) has been conducting crash testing, injuries from low-speed collisions have dramatically risen. While insurance carriers like us to believe that this is a function of greedy plaintiffs and overzealous attorneys, it's a matter of simple physics.

Insurance Is A Pain

While the pain that you may be experiencing in low velocity collisions is very real, for years the insurance industry has denied that it had any physiological basis. This has been, in a large part because the medical community has not been able to provide objective diagnostic evidence of "soft tissue injuries". This reinforces the need to see a chiropractor and/or back pain specialist(s) to receive the necessary evidence.

Diagnostic evidence from a specialist(s), when combined with the body of literature that shows disc and ligament injuries can occur at relatively low speeds, provides a solid foundation on which patients can fight for the compensation they deserve.

Research on Low-Speed Collisions

One study in particular, yielded some valuable insights. Crash pulse recorders were used to measure the Delta V, or closing velocity of various collisions. In an analysis of injuries in rear impact collisions, 24% of injuries were reported in collisions with delta V's of 0-3.1 mph and another 49% of injuries were reported with delta V's of 3.1-6.2 mph.

Think about that for a second: A full 73% of injuries occurred at speeds of 6.1 mph or less!

The Role of Chiropractic in Trauma Cases

A chiropractor trained in the evaluation and management of musculoskeletal injuries is absolutely critical in proper triage of trauma injury patients.

Chiropractor's are uniquely trained in diverse areas such as: spinal bio-mechanics disc pathology, MRI interpretation and neurophysiology that can provide the objective evidence that you will need to show damage to the ligaments in the spine. With that being said, it is important for chiropractor's to always recommend and refer whiplash and auto injury cases to appropriate specialists for second opinions. This is necessary to obtain all the necessary diagnostic testing and to paint an accurate picture of a patient's injuries.