If I have an old injury will I still be covered after an accident?
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SafeCare Docs – Central Florida
Accident Injury Medical Care – Accident Doctor
www.safecaredocs.com
Serving Central Florida
(407) 438-2432
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Our common concern like I get from some patients is while I’m little older, I have got some arthritis or someone like me who has played college football, who has significant injuries from the past. Sometimes people feel like that well I got old injuries, you know, they’re always going to say; well, you got an old injury and this won’t be covered because you’ve had previous existing problems before and in some cases that’s true. But one of the good things is that going to Safe Care Docs or specialist like somebody in our network is that we are highly trained and there are specific things that you can do to differentiate old injury from new injury. It’s much easier to differentiate old from new. The sooner we see after the accident. The certain things that we see, we feel heat on the skin, we sometimes feel DMO or fluid into the joints and there is a different level of pain. There are things that look newer when they are older. And diagnostically we can do certain tests to see if there’s fluid still in the joint. So for example, I had a patient who is 45 years old just like me, was very active in sports and had two previous herniated discs and also a couple of springs and fractures from some old sports injuries. Now, his concern was that if he tried to get the treatment for his accident then the insurance carrier was going to say that he had pre-existing conditions and sure enough that’s exactly what they said. So we went back to his M.R.I. results and the radiologist who does our reads for us said, you know what he’s got a DMO in the same area on which you examine you found some swelling and tenderness. So we put these two things together and then his attorney took over that point and presented us to the insurance carrier and sure enough we were able to show objectively that old injury may have been present but it wasn’t his fault that he had some previous injury. He was in a car accident and his old injury got a new injury on top of it. So, again it’s very important to get checked as quick as possible after the accident. Florida law only gives you fourteen days. We really recommend you that you try within the first seventy two hours. It’s really the most critical time to differentiate some of these new symptoms that we see versus old injury.